The Auditor-General has criticised the Minister of Finance and Treasury for “difficult to track” public spending, after the National Party raised concerns about the 2021 Budget.

Auditor-General John Ryan wrote to National’s finance spokesmen Andrew Bayly and Michael Woodhouse on Tuesday, saying he had, after their complaint, investigated a series of policy announcements the Government had made and how they stacked up with public spending listed in the Budget.

Ryan broadly criticised the Government for the way its spending promises are announced, and then accounted for through Budget documents and department annual reports.

“needs to front up and explain why he allowed this to happen, and to take urgent action to fix it”.

He said spending within both the former Labour-coalition Government’s Provincial Growth Fund, and the Government’s Covid-19 Response and Recovery Fund had been difficult to reconcile.

“It is often difficult to track, from publicly available documents, the funding of policy initiatives in Budget announcements ... This is made more difficult when the funding relates to an array of inter-related initiatives, funds, programmes, and packages,” he said.

“It is complicated when funding flows through various [Budget] Votes administered by various departments. It is further complicated when descriptors used in policy announcements differ from those used in the Budget documents, which is what happened with the Homelessness Action Plan package.”

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He said MPs and the public should be able to “track funding for major policy initiatives ... the expenditure incurred under the appropriations, and the relevant performance information about what has been achieved with that public money”.

Ryan, investigating the National MP’s specific complaints about a number of funding streams, found the Ministry of Primary Industries and Land Information New Zealand had not made the required disclosures about two initiatives: a conifer control programme and a pest and weed initiative.

However, this mistake was inadvertent, he said.

Bayly said Finance Minister Grant Robertson “needs to front up and explain why he allowed this to happen, and to take urgent action to fix it”.

“The Government allocated huge amounts of taxpayer money to spend, but on numerous instances failed to identify in its Budget documents what actual initiatives that money was to be used for,” he said.

The $100 million conifer control programme was a “huge amount of funding” that was not properly documented, Bayly said.

“In this case, and several others that we’ve found so far, the information was omitted.”

Robertson’s office and the Treasury have been contacted for comment.