As The Program Design

ANAO Report No.11 2014–15 The Award of Grants under the Clean Technology Program 60

2.50 To

facilitate the assessment of applications by the IA committees, the department provided committee members with an assessment template. This template did not provide a basis for scoring applications; rather it provided a means of the committee member, who was allocated as a spokesperson for the application, recording recommended scores. Using the template, committee members could:  record a score for the application against each merit criterion after considering the departmental assessment report, the original application and any relevant attachments; and  provide their scores against each criterion to the Secretariat in advance of the relevant meeting. 72

2.51 In

addition, the template enabled committee members to do more than simply record an assessment score against each criterion and indicate whether the member supported or did not support the award of funding. In particular, the template provided a means for committee members to record the rationale for their scoring, which is important in promoting accountability in assessment processes. However, the department advised ANAO in May 2014 that: The [templates] were not designed to be provided back to the Secretariat to keep as a permanent record and were not kept by the Secretariat. Members are told that they can leave papersdocuments at the end of the meeting to be destroyed should they not wish to keep these themselves. Scores are placed by the Secretariat into a template that lists all applications for that meeting these are kept as a record by the Secretariat. At the meeting the scores are then moderated following discussion of each application by the committee those members with conflicts did not provide scores and were not present during the discussion or the final decision of the committee on an application where they had a conflict. The final decision and recommendation of the committee is put into a decision sheet and recorded in minutes.

2.52 Where

templates were provided by committee members to the department, they were not retained in departmental records. In this respect, in October 2014, the department advised ANAO that: 72 Prior to a meeting, the Secretariat and the Chair of the meeting would allocate two or three spokespersons to each application. The allocation of applications was influenced by the conflicts of interest that had been reported and the size of the project being considered.