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ANAO Report No.11 2014–15 The Award of Grants under the Clean Technology Program 22 of two indicators to assess applications against the first merit criterion. The existence of two indicators was not identified in the program guidelines, and the second indicator that was used in the assessment of applications 24 was not identified until the fifth version of the customer guidelines, promulgated in December 2012. 25 22. More broadly, the assessment and selection method identified in the program guidelines was inconsistent with the approach approved by the then Government, which referred to a competitive grants program. In this regard, the assessment and selection process that was implemented reflected elements of a merit‐based, non‐competitive program. In particular, the programs were not implemented in a way that applications competed for the available funding by being ranked in order of merit. Rather, projects were approved for funding so long as:  the application had been assessed as eligible and as having some merit rather than being rated highly against each merit criterion as was required by the program guidelines 26 ; and  sufficient program funding remained available. 23. In addition, the department did not develop a sufficiently structured process for assessing applications against the merit criteria, with the assessment of applications involving a range of factors that the department andor IA considered pertinent. In this respect, one IA committee chair advised ANAO that the committee took into account a range of objective and subjective matters that were not reflected in the records of the assessment process. Further, while the department provided committee members with an assessment template to facilitate the assessment of applications by IA, any completed templates were not retained by the department. In these circumstances, the basis for funding recommendations made by IA to the program delegate was not evident. 27 24 Namely, grant funds per tonne of carbon abated, which represented the fiscal cost of abatement. 25 The second indicator that was used in the assessment of applications was grant funds per tonne of carbon abated, not total carbon savings over the life of the conservation measures as had been stated in the customer guidelines. 26 The department did not define the requirement to ‘score highly against each merit criterion’ until May 2013 when it was identified that a score of at least 50 per cent was required against each merit criterion. 27 The department recorded scores provided by individual committee members against each merit criterion prior to committee meetings and, following the meetings, recorded a recommendation and a total merit score.