Review finds governance failures in Defence contract
A 500-million-dollar defence department data management project is in disarray according to a previously secret review which has now been tabled in the senate. The review has identified multiple serious governance failures, and it also raises questions about the 100-million-dollar contract issued to consulting firm KPMG as part of the project.
Transcript
00:00 The project's called One Defence Data and it's this kind of minority report vision of
00:07 being able to unify all of the different silos of defence data from personnel to logistics
00:13 to geospatial imagery into the one place at the one time so that war fighters in combat
00:20 can kind of pull up this magic pyramid and solve the problem at hand.
00:25 The issue is Defence has been trying to do this for a very long time and has spent a
00:30 lot of money trying to do it.
00:32 Before the last election the latest iteration was announced by Andrew Hastie, then Assistant
00:37 Defence Minister.
00:39 A $500 million kind of vision to achieve this and the key contract worth $100 million was
00:46 awarded to KPMG basically to kind of deliver the technology.
00:51 This is a review by a firm called Ancrum Consulting and it's pretty scathing.
00:56 It basically says this whole project has been retrospectively designed in order to justify
01:04 issuing a contract and as a result a whole bunch of key governance documents were not
01:10 signed off.
01:11 There's really poor traceability of taxpayer funds which are going to KPMG.
01:17 There's great uncertainty according to these documents about whether KPMG is doing the
01:22 work required for the money and if it is doing it, whether it's doing it up to the standard
01:27 expected.
01:28 There's been a whole dilution, if you like, of what kind of expectation Defence has of
01:35 KPMG.
01:36 There was even a repayment of $100,000 issued to KPMG even though the government accepted
01:43 at the time the payment wasn't warranted and it was made quote unquote in the interests
01:49 of a collaborative working relationship.
01:51 At the time of the reviews Defence said that yes it had some problems with traceability
01:56 and a couple of other things but it also rejected a whole bunch of these findings made by this
02:02 firm and KPMG told me last night that it rejects any allegations of impropriety and that every
02:10 dollar spent by Defence has been earned by the firm.
02:13 [BLANK_AUDIO]