No shortcut to process

Normal, Sports
Source:

The National, Tuesday 4th June 2013

 By HENRY MORABANG

ACTING executive director of PNG Sport Foundation Iammo Launa reminded the national sporting federation that her organisation had no control over the funds for the 2015 Games.

 Launa was responding to PNG athletics union president Tony Green’s claims concerning delay in releasing funds for the respective team’s preparation for the South Pacific Games in 2015.

Green said the slowness in releasing funds for the Grassroots To Gold (G2G) programme has hampered the preparation of some sporting codes.

Launa said funds for the national federation were controlled by the finance department.

What the national federations need to do was to lodge applications (requests of payments) to PNG Sports Federation, who then would forward them to the PNG Sports Foundation. The foundations would then submit the applications to the finance department for verification and processing of payments. 

“It takes time but what can the PNG Sports Federation or the PNG Sports Foundation do about the long process of getting financial support,” Launa said.

She said funding for the Team PNG’s preparation should be totally different from the overall funding for the preparation for the 2015 Pacific Games.

Allocations to Sports for 2013 had already been approved based on submissions made last year.  

The procedure in place now is for sporting codes to lodge their requests for payments with supporting documentation to the PNG Sports Federation Olympic Committee (PNGSFOC).

The committee will screen the requests before forwarding it to the PNG Sports Foundation for cheques to be drawn. The cheques then go to finance department for payments.

Green had said people who gave their time to sporting bodies as volunteer administrators wanted to spend that helping athletes by productively carrying out programmes, not running around getting three quotations for every single payment that needs to be made. 

“It’s a very time consuming and cumbersome process,”Green said. 

“By the time the cheques come out, the figures have all changed and it gets very messy. Its simply not practical to do things this way.

“We need to have the flexibility to adapt to whats happening on the ground and act immediately when a need arises. 

“That means being able make payments on the spot.”