A report by the Auditor-General examining funding awarded under Sport Australia’s Community Sport Infrastructure Grant (CSIG) Program has found that funding was not informed by an appropriate assessment process and successful applications were not those assessed as the most deserving.
The audit followed an incident in in last year’s Federal election when a candidate presented a cheque to a bowling club for $127,373 in funding.
The objective of the audit was to assess whether the award of funding under the CSIG program was informed by an appropriate assessment process and sound advice.
In his report Award of Funding under the Community Sport Infrastructure Program, Auditor-General Grant Hehir that 684 grants totalling $100 million were awarded by the Minister for Sport in three funding rounds between December 2018 and April 2019.
Mr Hehir found that while the program guidelines were well structured and included clear assessment criteria with transparent weightings, the design of the program was deficient in a number of important areas.
He said that “74 out of 100” would have been the “cut off score” if funding had been awarded based on Sport Australia’s assessed merit.
“417 applications – 61 per cent of the total approved – with a score below the cut off were approved for funding,” Mr Hehir said.
He determined that Sport Australia assessed the applications against the published assessment criteria while the Minister’s office conducted a parallel assessment process using other considerations.
“The Minister’s office drew upon considerations other than those identified in the program guidelines, such as the location of projects, and also applied considerations that were inconsistent with the published guidelines,” he said.
“It was this assessment process that predominantly informed the Minister’s funding decisions, rather than Sport Australia’s process.”
“This resulted in the assessment advice to the Minister being inconsistent with the approved program guidelines.”
“A significant shortcoming was that, while the program guidelines identified that the Minister for Sport would approve CSIG funding, there are no records evidencing that the Minister was advised of the legal basis on which the Minister could undertake an approval role,” the Auditor-General said.
“And it is not evident to the ANAO what the legal authority was.”
Mr Hehir made four recommendations, three relating to the design of the grant programs; the framework for managing conflicts of interest; and recording the reasons for assessment scores and the fourth for a consistent framework to be put in place applying to situations where a Minister decides upon the award of grant funding.
Sport Australia has acknowledged the Auditor-General’s commentary and has accepted the recommendations made.
“There are lessons from this for the future,” a spokesperson said.
The Auditor-General’s online report can be accessed at this PS News link and his 76-page printed report can be accessed at this PS News link.
