Summary
The First Nations Development Fund is a lottery grant program available exclusively to First Nations in Alberta. It is supported by a portion of revenues from government-owned slot machines in Alberta First Nation casinos. From 2006 to 2016, the Department of Indigenous Relations allocated over $980 million in FNDF grants to support hundreds of social, economic and community development projects in Alberta’s First Nation communities.
In 2013, we found inadequacies in three aspects of the FNDF program; communication of eligibility requirements, assessments of applications, and monitoring of recipients’ compliance with grant agreements.
Conclusion
In this follow-up audit we have concluded that management has implemented one of our three recommendations:; the department has improved its systems to communicate its interpretations of eligible uses of FNDF grant funds.
We have repeated two recommendations because the department is still unable to:
- demonstrate it has made sufficient improvements to its processes to assess and approve complex grant applications
- monitor for and correct non-compliance with grant agreements