From A The Program Design

ANAO Report No.11 2014–15 The Award of Grants under the Clean Technology Program 44 one document that outlined important aspects of the grant selection process were observed. In this regard, ANAO identified that:  the better approach is for a single program guidelines document to be prepared and approved that represents the reference source for guidance on the grant selection process, including the relevant threshold and assessment criteria, and how they will be applied in the selection process; but  where more than one document is produced and each outlines important aspects of the grant selection process, it is important that agencies recognise that, collectively, all such documents constitute the program guidelines for the purposes of the CGGs. Accordingly, these documents should collectively be subject to the grant program approval requirements and made available to stakeholders.

2.7 The

program guidelines provided an overview of the programs, as required by the CGGs. However, a separate document referred to by the department as the customer guidelines was also prepared. The department’s intent in providing customer guidelines was to give prospective applicants a more comprehensive reference point for application development and the assessment and selection process. Despite this intention, the customer guidelines did not provide potential applicants with an accurate overview of the assessment process in relation to the:  opportunity for applicants to provide additional information after application submission;  department assisting applicants to reframe applications to exclude proposed capital investment activities that were not considered to provide a relative contribution to carbon savings that was commensurate with the share of project costs; or  approach used to assess applications against the merit criteria, with specific reference to the indicators used to assess merit criterion one and a range of undocumented factors considered important by the IA committees in arriving at funding recommendations. 51 51 Additional factors considered in the assessment of applications were provided from December 2012. Further, the processes relating to incomplete and reframed applications are discussed in paragraphs 3.10 to 3.34, while chapter four identifies how indicators for merit criterion one were assessed.      ANAO Report No.11 2014–15 The Award of Grants under the Clean Technology Program