Monitoring and Reporting on Investments

Introduction

Public funding provides for nearly all land transport services and infrastructure in New Zealand – and we’re accountable to New Zealanders for how we invest in that funding. This means closely monitoring costs and showing that services and infrastructure we’ve invested in fulfil their intended purpose and deliver their expected outcomes and benefits.

This section of the Planning &Investment Knowledge Base provides information about the different activities of Transport Agency's investment monitoring framework.

Annual Achievement Reports

Each Approved Organisation and Transport Agency(state highways) must provide an annual achievement report to the Transport Agency.

Transport Agency is accountable for its investment decisions. The information provided in the achievement reports provides feedback on the delivery of the programmes that Transport Agency has purchased. The achievement reports are also used for benchmarking and comparing network performance across New Zealand. Reports are developed by Transport Agency using the information provided, and are made available to Approved Organisations and Transport Agency(state highways) for their use.

The report must be submitted to the Transport Agency via Transport Investment Online (external link) by mid-July. The precise date is defined each year in a General Circular issued by Transport Agency.

Investment assurance activities

The investment assurance framework focuses on providing assurance about the services and infrastructure Transport Agency invests in. It also seeks to systematically identify opportunities to improve both Transport Agency's and the transport sector’s performance.

The framework covers two main audit and monitoring activities:

Investment audits, and
Investment performance measurement, which includes performance measures and post implementation reviews.

Key features of investment assurance activities

The table below summarises the focus and scope of these different monitoring activities, the assurance they seek to provide, and business improvement opportunities they aim to identify.

	Investment audits	Investment performance measurement
Focus:	Approved Organisations and Transport Agency(state highways)	Completed projects or packages that Transport Agency has providing funding for
What is assessed ?	Approved Organisations and Transport Agency(state highways) capability	Whether expected benefits of projects/packages been achieved for expected cost, explanation of variation of actual results from expected
Assurance Provided	Approved Organisations and Transport Agency(state highway) have systems, processes, and people in place to manage their investment risk and deliver sought outcomes	Projects/packages invested in are achieving what was intended and for expected cost
Business improvement opportunities it helps identify	Identify and share good practice to improve Transport Agency and entity performance Provide better intelligence on the capability and performance of entities to be used in Transport Agency's investment practices Identify opportunities to improve Transport Agency's processes, systems, and guidance to entities	Learn lessons for future projects/ packages that are invested in, including good practice to share with others

Further information on investment assurance activities

The links to each of the monitoring activity types (see above the table) provides further details on how these activities are carried out and further links to the following topics:

How the investment assurance work programme is developed
An overview of fieldwork for the different audit and review activities
The information required for the different investment assurance activities
Details of past and current audit programmes are published on the Transport Agency website.