The city’s Social Welfare Bureau failed to unify standards evaluating financial assistance applications among its sub-units in 2013, meaning the Bureau’s evaluations and approvals for such aid schemes may not be fair and just, the Commission of Audit says. In 2013, the Social Welfare Bureau approved some MOP309.7 million (US$38.7 million) for individual and family-group applicants perceived to be economically impoverished. But the city’s audit authority indicated in a report released yesterday that the Bureau’s five social service centres had different evaluation standards for the 7,990 applications for financial assistance that it received in the year before. ‘The Social Welfare Bureau did not rule clear instructions for quantifying social benefits, such as cash handouts, that may be included in bank deposits and cash [of applicants]. This means every subordinate service centre has its own quantifying standards for evaluating applications,’ the Commission wrote in the report. Different standards Currently, applicants for government financial assistance need to be verified by the Bureau as being in severe economic straits based on the Minimum Subsistence Index of the year. To verify whether the applicants are economically impoverished, the government department will evaluate income as well as bank deposits and applicants’ cash. However, the Bureau will waive the official social benefits that applicants receive, such as cash handouts, as their income and bank deposits as these benefits may impact negatively on their applications. But the Commission of Audit indicated that two service centres of the Bureau – Centre A and Centre B (without identifying them) showed that they had very different standards on waiving the amount of cash handouts that applicants received. ‘Centre A waived the accumulative amount of cash handout of all available years, while Centre B only waived the amount for 2013, leading the two centres to have obvious different standards in evaluating applications. Consequently, one application that is approved for financial assistance by Centre A may be rejected by Centre B,’ the audit authority found. According to the report, the waived amount of cash handouts set by Centre A was MOP39,000, by adding up the total amount of cash handouts per permanent resident between 2008 and 2013, while the waived amount set by Centre B totalled only MOP8,000. “The difference in evaluating applicants’ deposits and cash cannot guarantee [the Bureau] treats every individual equally. It causes some applicants to be rejected by the government for financial assistance although they are indeed in need. [The different standards] cannot ensure its evaluation is fair and just to all applicants as well,” the Commission complained. Oral orders trump written instructions In addition, the Commission indicated that the Bureau’s oral orders to its frontline employees differ from its written working guidelines of economic aid. ‘These related oral orders were only passed to frontline staff after multiple oral transmissions, leading different workers to have different standards in evaluating the applications based on their interpretation [of the orders],’ it wrote. According to the Commission, it had randomly inspected 20 application samples from Centre A and 10 from Centre B, discovering centre employees had missed one or more evaluation procedures or failed to collect the required documentation in 16 and 3 of the cases, accounting for 80 per cent and 30 per cent of the total, respectively. ‘The audit result shows that Centre A handled a total of 2,168 applications while Centre B received 221. Centre A handled 10 times more cases [than Centre B], and the frequency of Centre A not obeying the evaluation scheme is also higher,’ said the report. On the other hand, the Commission found that the Social Welfare Bureau had granted rental subsidies to two applicants who had already received the same subsidies from the city’s Housing Bureau, involving MOP74,950. However, the Commission said the social department had not discovered the issue prior to the audit report. The report also slammed the Bureau for not reducing its cash in hand although it actually could. The Commission indicated that a proportion of MOP4.35 million in financial assistance that the government granted by cash, accounting for 16 per cent of the total, could actually be distributed in non-cash ways, such as by cheque. It claimed that handing out cash had caused distributors of the financial aid to suffer unnecessary risks and pressure.
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