Nowergian government and municipal councils enable some immigrant organizations to misuse public funds through manipulated projects
Posted by African Press International on January 5, 2012
By api
Organizations seeking public funds in 2012 may have to prove more to get the money in order to continue their projects. It is a known fact that the government and the municipalities that give money for projects, at times do so through favouritism and at times give money to organizations and groups that do not deserve to get funding.
Every year, Norway dishes out public funds to immigrant organizations and other groups that spring up ever year timing the month when money is to be given out.
The projects, in most cases are good, but 70% of the projects readily start and waste pubic funds because some officers who give out the money are corrupt.
The government and other municipal groups will soon start receiving applications from project organizations. There are, however, some organizations that only make a list of names of people claiming they are members yet not and presenting such names with the application for the money. These are organization who on getting money under false premisses turn such money into personal use.
Oslo is such municipality with no effective control and inefficiency there gives opportunity to fake organizations to ask for money using fraud-methods.
For further investigation on these situation, African Press will request the municipality to provide copies of all applications from organizations seeking money in 2012. API will study the documents and compare with the work the organizations are doing, API will also ask to have meetings with private auditors/ accountants whose duty is to see that the information given to them by organizations to approve is genuine before they give the organizations clean bill when they ask for more money from the municipalities and the government.
This year, API will also request the organizations to allow it to attend some of the projects and see if they really take place. This should be done in collaboration with the municipality if it really intends for good use of public funds.
The municipality and the government dishing out money without proper and tight control is doing the Norwegian people a disservice.
In the process of our investigations, we will seek to interview all those who have the responsibility to approve applications from organizations in an effort to find out what makes them believe the applications are genuine. It will also be interesting to know if they visit some of the projects in order to satisfy themselves that the projects are really going on as per the contents of the applications.
There are also organizations that are given money after double membership lists are delivered to the municipality and in some cases, the government. These double names are not easy to discover because of the way they are changed from the surname to the first name and so on and on. For a Norwegian, this is difficult to see because the names are not Norwegian..
End
