From the information provided in paragraphs 5.9 and 5.10, it is clear that

ANAO Report No.11 2014–15 The Award of Grants under the Clean Technology Program 116 which the recommended grants are expected to result in the granting activity achieving its objectives.

5.14 In

all cases, IA provided a clear funding recommendation to the program delegate. However, the recommendation did not document:  the process that was used in forming recommendations, including any limitations of the assessment performed;  the reduction in carbon emissions or total carbon savings that were expected to result from funding the project. 132 As a result, the executed funding agreements for approved grants did not provide a:  clear target for the reduction in carbon emissions intensity for 35 approved grants; and  target for the reduction in carbon emissions intensity that matched the estimated reduction in the application, or the revised reduction where applicable, for 100 approved grants;  whether the recommendation was based on the original application or a reframed application only 57 of the 215 reframed applications that were identified in Chapter 3 and recommended by the IA committees were explicitly identified to the delegate as a reframed project; or  whether the application scored highly against each merit criterion, as required by the program guidelines.

5.15 In

respect to the program guidelines’ requirement that recommended applications ‘score highly against each merit criterion’, there was no minimum benchmark set even though the IA committees’ recommendations were based, in part, on the allocated merit score. Advice was not provided, by the program management area of the department, on how this requirement should be interpreted until late December 2012 10 months into the programs. Specifically, on 21 December 2012, email advice was provided to departmental staff noting a ‘couple of instances where the score was below 50 per cent for example, a pass mark but was supported’; and advising that the overall merit score must be greater than 50 out of 100 for grants of less than 1.5 million or 60 out of 120 for grants of 1.5 million or more for the project to be approved. This was supplemented with a further email to assessors in May 2013 advising 132 The expected outcomes of grants were discussed in paragraph 2.72 to 2.75.