An official audit of the reports and accountability published by Victorian Public Service Departments has found them to be persistently inadequate and weak.
In his report, Measuring and Reporting on Service Delivery, Auditor-General Andrew Greaves examined all eight Departments and selected the Department of Treasury and Finance (DFT); the Department of Education and Training; and the former Department of Health and Human Services for detailed analysis.
“Over the last 20 years, our audits have found significant and persistent weaknesses in Departments’ performance reporting, including weak links between the objectives they set and the way they measure success,” Mr Greaves said.
“Departments are accountable to Parliament and the community for what they achieve using public funds,” he said.
“They must accurately report their performance in the Budget papers and their annual reports because this information is essential to identify what is working and what areas need improvement.”
Mr Greaves said the Departments didn’t measure or report on their performance well.
He said Departments didn’t fully comply with DTF’s Resource Management Framework; measure their service efficiency or effectiveness; or present their performance information in a way that enabled efficient and effective analysis.
He said it was also apparent that the process of adding new measures into the Budget papers was failing.
“The Framework requires Departments to measure output delivery and outcome achievement however, there are too many input and process measures and poorly constructed output measures and objective indicators in the Budget papers,” Mr Greaves said.
“This obfuscates Departments’ performance reporting and diminishes their accountability.”
He said his Office continued to find the same issues whenever it examined Departments’ performance reporting, which indicated the need for a “root and branch” review of the entire performance reporting framework.
Mr Greaves made 11 recommendations to all Departments aimed at improving the quality of the information in their performance statements, maintaining complete data dictionaries, and improving their explanations of variances between actual and targets.
The Auditor-General’s 112-page Report can be accessed at this PS News link.
