A committee report has recommended again that the auditor-general should be able to initiate a performance statement audit without approval from the finance minister.
The Joint Committee of Public Accounts and Audit (JCPAA) previously recommended the change to remove the ministerial approval requirement from the Auditor-General Act 1997.
“In fact, we recommended that this requirement be removed twice before but the previous government took no action,” committee chair Julian Hill said.
“While we appreciate it’s not the highest priority change to pursue, we continue to see it as important to streamline the ANAO’s work and hope the minister will progress the change.”
A further three recommendations were made in the report, one was that the Australian National Audit Office (ANAO) prepares a summary of the trends and best practice in performance reporting.
Another was for the ANAO and the Department of Finance to revise the schedule for performance statements to allow the office to start its work earlier in the cycle. This is to allow interim findings to contribute to budget statements.
The final recommendation was for the ANAO to let the committee know about its audit methodology, audit strategy documents and agencies’ feedback on those papers and for Finance to provide the committee with guidance already issued or planned in relation to performance statements.
In his foreword, Hill said Australians do not have a reliable way of knowing whether performance statements are true or not.
“Do all those often mind-numbing KPIs and measures fairly represent what an agency does? Are there actually data sources underneath all the reports? Are they a fair measure of what’s been achieved, or did someone fudge the books?” Hill wrote.
“The introduction of performance statements audits is, therefore, a big change for the ANAO, and it is a change the committee has, and continues to, strongly support.”
Hill continued to state the ANAO’s audits of the 2021-22 performance statements showed “both a clear improvement in the performance reporting of audited entities and increased engagement in the public sector more broadly”.
“Sometimes entities need to know that someone might be checking their work, to check it themselves,” Hill said.
READ MORE:
