ANAO Report No.10 2014–15 Administration of the Biodiversity Fund Program
14
Discretionary grants
8. In
addition to the grants selected through the competitive merit‐based assessment
process, there were an additional four discretionary grants awarded under
the Biodiversity Fund program, with a total value of 7.65 million ranging
from 176 000 to 6 million.
9
The projects funded through these discretionary
grants involved: the provision of vegetation planting guides and workshops
in 2012; research services in support of monitoring and evaluation activities;
the restoration of native forest in Tasmania; and identifying and documenting
new plant and animal species.
Administrative arrangements
9. The
Biodiversity Fund program is administered by Environment.
10
This role
has included design of the program, implementation of the grant assessment and
selection process for each funding round, and ongoing management of the funded
projects. As at 30 June 2014, the division within the department with responsibility
for administering Biodiversity Fund program projects and a range of
other Environment programs had approximately 160 staff.
Audit objective and criteria
10. The
objective of the audit was to assess the effectiveness of the Department
of the Environment’s administration of the Biodiversity Fund program.
To form a conclusion against the objective, the ANAO adopted the following
high‐level criteria:
governance arrangements were appropriate;
grant
assessment processes to select funded projects under the program were
open, transparent, accountable and equitable;
negotiation and management of funding agreements with approved
applicants was sound; and
effective
monitoring, reporting and evaluation arrangements were established
to determine the extent to which the program has achieved its
objectives.
9 While the availability of discretionary grants had been outlined in the grant guidelines for Round 1, it
was not outlined in the guidelines in the following three rounds. 10
The department was formerly the Department of Sustainability, Environment, Water, Populations and Communities, but was changed in September 2013 as part of revised administrative arrangements.
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ANAO Report No.10 2014–15 Administration of the Biodiversity Fund Program
15
Overall conclusion
11. The
Biodiversity Fund program, administered by the Department of the Environment
Environment, was established as a 946.2 million competitive, merit
‐based grants program
11
as part of the Clean Energy Future initiative.
12
The program was designed to protect and enhance biodiversity by providing
land managers with grants to undertake on‐ground works to revegetate land,
protect existing biodiversity, and prevent the spread of invasive species. The
program is broad in scope, with funding recipients including individual
landholders through to large state government departments, and grants
ranging from just over 7000 to almost 6 million.
12. In
the main, Environment established suitable arrangements for the administration
of the Biodiversity Fund program, including: a governance framework
that provided appropriate visibility of program delivery to departmental
management; generally sound processes and procedures to underpin
the complex grant assessment process; and funding agreements and management
arrangements with grant recipients that, in general, supported the
delivery of funded projects while protecting the Commonwealth’s interests.
There were, however, shortcomings in aspects of the department’s administration
of the program, specifically:
the assessment of each of the eligibility criteria, as outlined in the
program’s grant guidelines, was not sufficiently robust or transparent.
In particular, there was a lack of clarity in the guidelines relating to
some eligibility criteria, limited guidance for departmental assessors
undertaking the
eligibility assessments,
and insufficient
documentation to demonstrate that an eligibility assessment had been
undertaken against all eligibility criteria for each recommended
application; and
the
compliance strategy, which was developed relatively early during program
implementation, was not fully implemented. While the department
adopted a case management approach, the absence of a risk
‐based compliance monitoring program, as envisaged in the compliance
strategy, reduced the assurance that the department had
11 There were also discretionary grants available alongside the competitive merit-based funding rounds.
12 In December 2013, the program was closed to new applicants, with unexpended program funds
returned to consolidated revenue.
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