A performance audit into the effectiveness of the Department of Education, Skills and Employment’s (DESE) framework for managing payments to Jobactive providers has found the Department to have acted reasonably.
The audit examined payments made to a network of employment service providers across Australia worth about $2 billion to 2.4 million claims each year paid to support employers and job seekers.
In his report Jobactive – Integrity of payments to employment service providers, Auditor-General Grant Hehir said DESE was ‘largely effective’ in managing the integrity of payments to providers.
“The DESE jobactive Payment Integrity Assurance Framework is effectively implemented, however, it could be improved by a detailed analysis of non-compliance instances,” Mr Hehir said.
He said these would provide DESE with insights for continuous improvement and targeted assurance activities.
“DESE has established a largely appropriate assurance framework to ensure payment integrity,” he said.
“The assurance framework is informed by risk with appropriate mechanisms to detect incorrect payments and governance arrangements to monitor the assurance activities.”
Mr Hehir said however there was no detailed analysis undertaken of the causes for non-compliance across rolling random sample cycle periods.
He said that while DESE had effectively implemented the framework to manage and monitor payments to employment service providers, it had not fully implemented the recommendation from the Auditor-General’s Jobactive: Design and Monitoring report with respect to assessing the efficiency and effectiveness of compliance activities.
Mr Hehir made one recommendation to DESE related to updating the assurance framework.
The Auditor-General’s Report can be accessed at this PS News link and a 49-page printable version at this link.
The Audit team was Corinne Horton and a consultant company.
