GORDON LIGHTFOOT | National
GROWING AOTEAROA FOR ALL
A staffer at the Ministry for Business Innovation and Employment has been given the unglamorous job of counting up the total number of email approvals it took to spend $33 million over seven years on an IT project that achieved nothing.
Minister for Immigration Erica Stanford says that Immigration NZ (part of MBIE) misled the government when reporting on how well the “biometric capability upgrade” was going. She said staff “deliberately withheld information” from her, and were doing “creative accounting” to cover up their seven year bungle.
21 year old Emma Johansen, a new grad policy advisor at MBIE, says she doesn’t really know where to start on her “hunt for answers”.
“Apparently I need to find all the emails that were sent between managers and senior staff that signed off on each part of the spending over seven years,” she told the Whakataki Times.
When asked whether this was likely to be achievable with staff scrambling to cover themselves and stay employed, Ms. Johansen was unsure. “Ummm yeah not sure about that one. I think we’re doing a full action plan around how to count up the emails first, which we’ll develop over the next couple of months,” she said.
“I mean maybe this isn’t the best use of my time or the cost of my entry level salary, but I’ve got bills to pay. If they want me to go and do something then I’ll go and do it.
“I’ve been to four meetings on this, all over Microsoft Teams, and I still don’t really know what the biometric capability upgrade is, or was. I don’t think they know!”
Ms. Johansen is now apparently reading through one of four 30-page comms plans developed for the project in 2022.
More to come.
