Performance Audit: The COVID-19 pandemic – Business continuity within the public administration

The Auditor General, Mr. Charles Deguara, presented the performance audit highlighted in caption to the Honourable Speaker of the House of Representatives Dr Anglu Farrugia. The main focus of this audit was to determine the extent to which Government ensured continuity of operations/service in conjunction with the efficient and effective implementation of COVID-19 related measures.

This performance audit showed that, generally, Government continued to provide critical and essential services throughout the pandemic. This conclusion is based on a review of the strategic direction provided by the Office of the Prime Minister (OPM), the Ministry for Health (MFH) and the Ministry for Finance and Employment (MFE), as well as an evaluation of how two line ministries, the Ministry for Social Policy and Children’s Rights (MSPC) and the Ministry for Education, Sport, Youth, Research and Innovation (MEYR) adopted business continuity measures to deliver their essential services throughout the COVID-19 pandemic from March 2020 up to March 2021.

Whilst OPM assumed leadership responsibilities, this Ministry collaborated with MFH to provide inputs regarding health and safety aspects, and MFE to provide financial and economic direction. This arrangement offered clear lines of responsibilities as well as strategic direction during these extremely challenging times.

Technology played a central part in ensuring business continuity. Within this context, MITA provided support to Governmental entities, which, in turn, permitted initiatives such as remote working and online customer interfaces to facilitate service delivery. MITA’s initiatives also enabled the provision of additional services and facilitated customer interface through servizz.gov.

This performance audit confirmed that, as a line Ministry, MSPC embraced direction and guidelines provided by the central Ministries. Moreover, MSPC’s processing and disbursement of social benefits were at par with the Ministry’s pre-pandemic performance levels. Of note is that this Ministry, generally, managed efficiently and effectively process re-engineering measures, such as the transfer of area offices business to servizz.gov.

This review showed that the task of the other line Ministry sampled (MEYR) was logistically more complex than the former as MEYR had to undertake a rapid shift in its teaching methods while maintaining physical health and safety measures. Despite the general success of these measures, some difficulties prevailed. A NAO survey among the teaching and administrative staff confirmed that the provision of both traditional and online teaching had to overcome significant challenges, such as lack of space in classrooms, to maintain social distance and the subsequent need for more teachers to cater for additional classrooms. Other difficulties encountered concerned children who for various reasons were not able to benefit fully from online schooling.

This review served to identify issues which could be better tackled in emergency situations. To this end, the NAO proposed a number of strategic recommendations aimed at the public administration in general, and specific recommendations for the line Ministries selected for this audit. The NAO augurs that Government entities continue to undertake postmortems to elicit the lessons learnt, particularly those related to processes, which could be retained beyond the pandemic, and to enable further updating of national contingency plans.