ANAO Report No.11 2014–15 The Award of Grants under the Clean Technology Program
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departmental decision‐maker concluding that a recommendation to approve
funding is consistent with the program guidelines as a policy of the
Commonwealth as was required by FMA Regulation 9.
71
Assessment of applications by the departmental committee
2.44 The
creation of the departmental committee assisted with the management
of the workloads for the CTIC and the CTFFIC. This arrangement,
however, meant that a number of merit assessments were undertaken
by the department rather than IA, as described in the program and customer
guidelines, such that specialist knowledge was not brought to bear in the
assessment of applications.
2.45 As
shown in Figure 2.3 on page 63, 345 applications 41 per cent were assessed
by the departmental committee. In 75 per cent of these assessments, the
departmental committee agreed with the score provided by the departmental
assessor. By way of comparison, the CTIC and the CTFFIC agreed
with the score allocated by the departmental assessor in 18 per cent of cases.
Given that IA had a role in providing specialist knowledge in the assessment
of applications, the use of a different arrangement did not allow for the
specialist knowledge that was available to be applied. As a consequence, the
transparency of the assessment process was reduced for applicants and the knowledge
applied differed across applications.
Documentation retained to support recommendations
2.46 The
procedures manual set out the role of departmental officials in assisting
the IA committees with the final merit assessment. This included compiling
an ‘application deck’, which included the departmental assessment report,
the submitted application and other relevant supporting documentation.
The application deck was intended to provide committee members
with ‘the core documents needed to review and assess the application’
and was only to include information ‘that is necessary and sufficient
for the committee to make an informed decision’.
2.47 While
the department developed a scoring framework to be used in the departmental
assessment that was presented to the IA committees, the
71 Up until 30 June 2014, this obligation was provided for under FMA Regulation 9. From 1 July 2014,
this obligation was provided for under section 21 of the PGPA Act, which requires accountable authorities to govern in a way that is not inconsistent with the policies of the Australian Government.
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evidence provided by the department did not reflect that the IA committees
used the same framework in scoring applications against the merit criteria. In
this respect, the program management area of the department advised IA
committee members, in April 2012, that ‘committee members may wish to
score on some other basis’. In October 2014, the department confirmed this in
advice to ANAO that:
The purpose of the Carbon Scoring tool is to ensure that AusIndustry
Customer Service Managers take a uniform approach to scoring against this
criterion. Committee Members may wish to score on some other basis.
2.48 With
regard to IA committee deliberations one of the IA committee chairs
advised ANAO in September 2014 that: The
assessment was complex because there were many inputs that the committee
considered, with the final scores as presented by the CSM [Customer
Service Manager] being only some of them. Other critical issues that
had different bearings on various applications included:
the type and age of existing vs new equipment, the suppliers, the
amount of data provided on estimated performance of the new
equipment; depreciation rates etc
the
assessment of the validity of all the assumptions throughout the application
the
business profile of the applicant, its industry, competitors, the applicant
ʹs financial history and robustness of their future cashflow in addition
to the necessary citing of the Accountants Declaration
the production forecasts and how believable they were, particularly
how they related to sales forecasts ‐ and how this impacted the merit
criteria
the complexities around suitable boundary definitions for calculations
the
value for money in relative and absolute terms
the necessity to [sic] being consistent and fair in approach and where
appropriate taking into account many evolved learnings gained over
time with many many assessments completed
changing
government policy on treatment of carbon emissions.
2.49 The
consideration of these particular matters was not well recorded, as discussed
in paragraphs 2.50 to 2.54.
