The Auditor-General has released a report on her Office’s audits of the Transport cluster’s financial statements, issuing unqualified audit opinions for all cluster entities.
In her report, Transport 2020, Auditor-General Margaret Crawford said Transport cluster Agencies continued to experience challenges with accounting for land and infrastructure assets.
“Total patronage and revenue for public transport decreased by approximately 18 per cent in 2019–2020 due to COVID-19,” Ms Crawford said.
“While internal controls issues raised in management letters in the Transport cluster have decreased compared to the prior year, control weaknesses continue to exist in access security for financial systems,” she said.
“We identified 56 management letter findings across the cluster and 43 per cent of all issues were repeat issues”.
Ms Crawford said the majority of the repeat issues related to information technology controls around user access management.
The Auditor-General said RailCorp was renamed Transport Asset Holding Entity of New South Wales (TAHE) and converted to a for-profit statutory State-Owned Corporation on 1 July.
“There were three high risk issues identified – two related to financial reporting of assets and one for implementation of TAHE,” she said.
She said a plan was established by NSW Treasury to transition RailCorp to TAHE by 1 July 2019 however, a large portion of the planned arrangements were not implemented by 1 July 2020.
“As at the time of this report, the TAHE operating model, Statement of Corporate Intent (SCI) and other key plans and commercial agreements are not finalised,” she said.
“This matter has been included as a high risk finding in our management letter due to the significance of the financial reporting impacts and business risks for TAHE.”
Ms Crawford made two recommendations, one aimed at finalising TAHE’s operating model and commercial arrangements with public rail operators and another aimed at implementing a centralised process to record all significant contracts and agreements in a register across the Transport cluster.
The Auditor-General’s 31-page report can be accessed at this PS News link.
