Intended Audience for this Guidance
This guidance document should be read by those involved in the preparation of the Annual Report. Chief executives and the senior leadership teams should read the Overview section of the guidance. The person responsible for preparing the annual report for discussion by the departments' senior leadership team should read the entire document to know the purpose and the content requirements.
About this Guidance
This guidance document sets out what is expected and/or required of departments and Offices of Parliament in preparing their annual reports in accordance with the PFA and with other legislative or administrative requirements and expectations.
The annual report is to be fully compliant with New Zealand generally accepted accounting practice (GAAP). The financial statements should comply with the New Zealand equivalents to International Financial Reporting Standards (NZ IFRS).
For simplicity, the guidance often refers only to “departments”. In most of the guidance, this should be read as including Offices of Parliament and departments outside the public service, unless different requirements are explicitly identified. Specific differences for Intelligence and Security departments and Offices of Parliament are outlined in Annex 5.
The Crown Entities Act 2004 establishes separate but similar reporting requirements for statutory Crown entities. Annual report guidance for statutory Crown entities can be found at: http://www.treasury.govt.nz/publications/guidance/reporting/annualreports-ce.
The requirements/guidance outlined in this document apply until this document is updated or replaced. This document is scheduled for review post amendments to the PFA.
This document has been written by the State Sector Management team. We have also consulted with the Office of the Auditor-General.
Persistent URLs
This guidance document has frequent links to other guidance on the Treasury's website using persistent URLs (redirects maintained by OCLC for bibliographic purposes) to ensure that users of this guidance document will be redirected to the current location of guidance documents if the location changes on the Treasury website.
Questions and feedback
You should use this document as your first point of call for questions on departmental annual reporting.
General enquiries about the information contained in this guidance, not addressed in this guidance or the associated FAQs, can be directed to performanceinfo@treasury.govt.nz.
Any agency-specific questions should be addressed to your Treasury Vote team.
