SINGAPORE, 25 July 2023: The Singapore Tourism Board (STB) says it is committed to good corporate governance and the responsible use of public funds. It made the statement in response to observations made by the Auditor-General’s Office (AGO) concerning the Singapore Rediscovers Vouchers (SRV) scheme introduced in 2020.
STB said it had taken steps to review and tighten the processes based on the audit. The scheme was launched within four months amid the Covid-19 pandemic.
“Given the urgency of supporting local tourism businesses and jobs and the complexity of designing the government’s nationwide digital-only voucher scheme for the first time, we are heartened by AGO’s findings that STB had thought through the scheme design and put in place the necessary controls to ensure proper management.”
The key observations were on inadequate controls to ensure that the SRV grants were not disbursed to ineligible persons and that only eligible merchants and products were onboarded to the scheme. While STB had implemented checks to prevent abuse and detect wrongdoing, it recognised that some processes could have been more stringent.
For example, AGO observed that some citizens made false declarations to enjoy subsidies for children and youth. STB had relied on adult declarations and merchants’ verification of the redemptions.
“We intended to simplify the redemption process for the convenience of our citizens and tourism businesses and had assessed the risk of abuse to be small,” STB explained in the statement. “In hindsight, we should have implemented additional checks to verify eligibility. STB plans to take appropriate action against the individuals who had made the ineligible redemptions.”
STB also acknowledges that the processes to determine the eligibility of merchants and products could be improved.
AGO found inadequate supporting documents to show that 12 merchants had met the eligibility criterion. Although STB officers confirmed these 12 merchants’ eligibility, it acknowledges that internal standard operating procedures (SOPs) to ensure proper documentation can be tightened.
AGO’s test checks on the listed products of 80 merchants also found that 950 products were onboarded even though the merchants did not submit the necessary product lists to STB for eligibility checks. STB has clarified that given the volume of merchants and products under the programme. It adopted an SOP to verify product eligibility based on a sampling approach.
STB said it would make better use of technology and digital tools when launching new schemes.
