Nice job – getting paid to hand out money!

The Herald reports:

Former radio show partners Willie Jackson and John Tamihere were knocked back in a bid to handle distribution of $14 million of taxpayer funding for health and social services because they wanted too much money in overheads.

The pair put the total cost of distributing the Whanau Ora funding in the North Island at $21 million.

They wanted $21 million to hand out money? I’ll do it for half of that!

The document said the proposal was based on getting $21 million.

Of this, $1.7 million was to be spent on staff, $3.3 million on operating costs and more on governance.

Not quite it seems. They said it would cost $5 million to distribute the remaining $15 million or so. That sounds grossly inefficient.

TPK said the contract bid should be reduced from the $5 million in costs sought to $2.3 million at most.

It asked the authority to reduce its estimated $2 million cost to set up the distribution scheme.

I’d say the cost of distribution should be around 5% of the amount being distributed – at most!