Special Minister of State Chris Steel says work is being done to make procurement processes in the ACT more transparent, accountable and efficient. Photo: Thomas Lucraft.
The ACT Government has been accused of evading transparency reform after knocking back a motion to investigate developing a digital dashboard to track procurement processes.
There have been seven ACT Auditor General reports into various procurement processes in the past five years, with two projects – CIT contracts and the Campbell Primary School upgrade tender process – now being investigated by the ACT Integrity Commission.
The wording of the Government Procurement Board has also been raised as an issue, with the government already agreeing it needs to tighten its procurement decision reviewing system.
Shadow Assistant Treasurer Peter Cain had called on the ICT service to be developed to improve transparency and integrity around the process of awarding public funds through procurement.
“We need a single repository database that tracks tenders and contracts awarded by each individual agency, sorted by procurement packages,” he said.
“This should be open for businesses and the public to scrutinise.”
He pointed to the $78 million spent on the now-abandoned human resource and information management system (HRIMS), which was only made known through media reporting.
Mr Cain argued a digital dashboard would allow for more oversight of cross-government spending in the public service and would capture data on who is tendering for and being awarded contracts, timelines, approved expenditure for projects, and priorities across agencies.
“The ACT Government is well behind on a centralised management of shared services and digital transformation,” he said.
“Having an online ICT database … would make government more efficient, and it basically puts government in a better position not to waste tens of millions of dollars, as we have seen has happened.
“Unfortunately, the Special Minister of State [Chris Steel] evades enhancing transparency and further, the Government Procurement Legislation Amendment Bill 2023 is not the silver bullet he thinks it is.”
The aforementioned bill has been introduced by the ACT Government in response to the Auditor General’s more recent concerns around procurement processes.
Mr Steel changed Mr Cain’s motion, scrapping an investigation into a digital database and instead calling on the government to continue to deliver on the procurement reform program that is already underway.
Part of this is to develop and implement a roadmap to deliver an “integrated procurement ICT system”.
Mr Steel said the government had launched a ‘procurement unique identifier’ for projects earlier this year, which was already providing “enhanced data capture” and analytics across procurement processes.
“The unique identifier is captured on both the ACT Government’s contract register and notifiable invoices register to provide greater transparency of the ACT Government’s expenditure against our contracts,” he said.
“Work [is] already underway to consider how we can better track procurements through the unique identifier … and having better ICT support for procurements.
“Data is constantly being collated to capture what is on the various systems and tools used by government to inform a procurement process. This will help strengthen central visibility of procurement over time.”
Mr Steel’s changes were passed with the support of the ACT Greens, however MLA Jo Clay warned this didn’t mean a “free pass” by her party on reform in this area, as more work needed to be done.
“We need to give the ACT Public Service the licence to take calculated risks on the understanding that they will probably fail from time to time. But the correct response to this is: consider what you’ve learned,” she said.
“What is not acceptable is a failure where no one is accountable.”
Original Article published by Claire Fenwicke on Riotact.
