Australia’s passport office has been accused of mishandling contracts worth millions of dollars as over a dozen officials are investigated for potential misconduct.
The Australian National Audit Office (ANAO) has accused the national passport office of breaching finance laws in a damning audit released this week.
The report detailed serious issues with the department’s handling of procurement contracts worth over $1.5billion between 2019 and 2023, including the cancelling of a conference in a popular tourist destination at a cost of $135,000.
The Department of Foreign Affairs (DFAT) was found to have not complied with federal procurement rules by reportedly failing to declare conflicts of interests and not being ‘competitive’ or ‘transparent’ during decision-making.
DFAT is now investigating at least 18 individuals, both employees and contractors, in relation to the passport office’s procurement activities.
Some of the more alarming findings include four officials who spent over $30,000 on two trips to Port Douglas in north Queensland in late 2022 and February 2023 to inspect it as a potential location for a major conference.
The meeting was relocated to Canberra with taxpayers charged more than $104,000 in ‘cancellation fees and a non-refundable deposit paid to a resort in Port Douglas’.
‘The procurement of a resort in Port Douglas did not comply with the requirements of the DFAT procurement policy and did not represent value for money,’ the auditor-general stated in the report.
In another case, an APO official had a coffee with a Deloitte employee to talk about a possible contract.
The resulting documents were allegedly falsified to claim it was an ‘unsolicited proposal’ from Deloitte.
The cost of the contract reportedly blew out by almost 1,000 per cent over 30 months to over $3.5million.
‘The [DFAT] approval record inaccurately stated that Deloitte had ‘provided an unsolicited proposal,’ the report stated.
In response to the audit, Deloitte said the cumulative impact of the contract blowout was over $1.1million, not $3.5million.
Assistant Foreign Affairs Minister Tim Watts said: ‘The Albanese government takes these issues very seriously and is investigating further’.
‘Since the election of the Albanese government, we have been supporting the Australian Passport Office to undertake long-overdue improvements to its internal systems and processes to ensure it is able to efficiently deliver services to Australians.
‘The government will consider any further actions that may need to be taken in response.’
Following the report, DFAT said it has accepted a raft of recommendations while the passport office has implemented steps to ‘address procurement and cultural issues’.
