How grants administration mirrors procurement integrity
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Grants administration shares many of the same integrity risks as ordinary procurement, since public money is again being allocated to an external party, yet grants are sometimes treated with less rigour on the assumption that a worthy cause automatically reduces the genuine risk of misuse or poor administration involved.
Sound grants administration applies similar principles to procurement: clear eligibility criteria published in advance, transparent assessment against those criteria, declared conflicts of interest among assessors, and post-award reporting that actually verifies funds were spent as originally proposed rather than simply trusting a recipient's word without any real, ongoing check.
Because grant recipients are often smaller organisations with fewer internal controls than a typical commercial supplier, funders sometimes need to provide additional support or guidance to help recipients meet reporting obligations properly, rather than assuming every recipient already has the administrative capacity a larger commercial contractor would ordinarily be expected to have.