As With Program Design

   ANAO Report No.11 2014–15 The Award of Grants under the Clean Technology Program 51

2.21 The

risk of funding projects that would have proceeded without government funding was not addressed in practice, as highlighted by the examples in Table 2.2. Table 2.2: Projects largely complete at the time of application submission 62 Case study Relevant extract from committee discussion Merit score Program delegate decision Grant amount 1 The company was going to do this anyway and had planned to do this two years ago, and this program came along and provided opportunity to get free money. 89.7120 Supported 9 500 000 2 Project was 85 complete at the time of application. 101.9120 Supported 9 100 000 3 Project was partially complete and is part of a 45 million project. It was not clear what benefits could be attributed to program funding. 78.4100 Supported 800 000 3 The company had a legal undertaking to do this project regardless of whether the Commonwealth provides funding. 72.0100 Supported 66 897 Source: ANAO analysis of departmental records.

2.22 As

part of an internal review of the programs in November 2013, the department identified that: A consequence of no need‐for‐funding requirements is that some approved projects would have already been implemented without grant funding. In fact, some approved projects had already undergone internal final approvals and were already underway at the time of application.

2.23 Although

in some cases there were significant periods of time between the date of lodgement of an application, decision and execution of a funding agreement, there were also:  25 funding agreements with grants totalling 6.5 million that were executed on or after the project end date listed in the funding agreement; and 62 This information was sourced from informal notes taken by staff during IA committee meetings. The lack of formalised transcripts explaining committee discussions is discussed paragraphs 2.47 to 2.60.