ACT Directorates and Offices have implemented or partially implemented 92 per cent of the recommendations they said they would adopt from the ACT Ombudsman in the past two financial years.
In his report Did They Do What They Said They Would? Volume2, the ACT and Commonwealth Ombudsman Iain Anderson said his Office’s point-in-time assessments measured the progress made by eight ACT and Commonwealth Agencies to implement 73 accepted recommendations, made in 10 reports between 1 July 2019 and 30 June 2021.
Mr Anderson said the ACT entities assessed included ACT Corrective Services, ACT Revenue Office and ACT Policing.
“We can see from our assessments that Agencies are making improvements and doing things differently because of our recommendations,” Mr Anderson said.
“Policies and procedures were updated, communication with customers has improved, staff training was delivered, system changes are underway, and improvements were made to quality assurance processes, record keeping and service delivery,” he said.
“Overall, we found that of the 73 recommendations accepted by Agencies, 32 were implemented, 35 were partially implemented and six were not implemented.”
Mr Anderson said this meant 92 per cent of accepted recommendations were implemented or partially implemented.
“This is a pleasing outcome, noting that in some instances Agencies had limited time to implement the recommendations and COVID-19 impacted Agencies’ capacity to implement some recommendations,” the Ombudsman said.
Recognising that not all recommendations are the same, he said the recommendations varied in complexity, with some requiring considerable work over a significant period to implement, while others could be implemented relatively quickly.
“For example, we expect Agencies to provide an apology or better explanation more quickly than we expect Agencies to create or update a suite of policies and procedures or implement a systems upgrade,” Mr Anderson said.
“For these reasons, we recognise the Agencies featured in this Report are at different stages in their implementation of our recommendations.”
The Ombudsman’s 107-page Report can be accessed at this PS News link.
