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The powerful public accounts and audit committee of parliament has written to 29 of the top-spending government departments and agencies seeking their spending on consultants, contractors and labour hire over the past five years. The joint public accounts and audit committee launched an inquiry into government procurement this month, after the Australian National Audit Office found $47.4 billion was spent on government contracts last year, with a large jump in fees handed to consultants. The move came as Finance Minister Mathias Cormann yesterday disputed that taxpayers were committed to spending almost $10bn on “management and business professionals and administrative services” last year. Senator Cormann said the figure, reported in The Australian yesterday and also based on an analysis of AusTender data, was “false and misleading” because it included the full cost of multi-year contracts in a single year, including a $1.8bn 10-year defence contract. The minister said it was not possible to provide what he believed to be the true amount spent on outsourcing services such as labour hire, external contractors, rent and legal advice because the Finance Department did not collect that data as part of its general government financial statements. Senator Cormann said Australians rightly expected government administration “to be as cost efficient and effective as possible” and the government had “made significant progress on that front”. Opposition finance spokesman Jim Chalmers said it was “a bit rich” for the minister to dispute the figures from “the government’s own AusTender site” and he claimed there had been “substantial blowouts” in areas such as labour hire, project management and marketing under Senator Cormann’s watch. He said the government had been caught out wasting billions of dollars on consultants and contractors to do work that could have been done in many cases by the Australian public service “if it hadn’t been so savagely cut back”. As the parliamentary inquiry prepares to begin hearings, the major federal departments, and agencies such as the Australian Taxation Office and the Australian Federal Police, are among the 29 bodies that have been given a February 16 deadline to hand over their spending figures. Large accounting firms PricewaterhouseCoopers, Ernst & Young, Deloitte and KPMG, as well as top law firm Clayton Utz, will also be questioned by the committee. The inquiry will also call recently retired public service heads to give evidence. The inquiry will seek information from departments on the extent to which consultancy and non-consultancy contracts are being used to deliver core public service functions, and changes to the use of these services over the past five years, associated benefits or risks, and unintended consequences. The committee’s chairman, Liberal senator Dean Smith, told The Weekend Australian the inquiry would try to get to the bottom of taxpayer spending on consultants, contractors and labour-hire services. He said taxpayers wanted governments to do only the things that were absolutely necessary without wasting hard-earned taxpayer dollars. Labor’s Julian Hill, who as committee deputy chair helped to establish the inquiry, said the AusTender figures raised more questions than they answered. “Transparency and value for money are key. Ultimately if agencies need staff to do work then they should be allowed to employ them instead of living with fake staffing caps which they dodge through hidden labour-hire arrangements.” |
