The audit reviewed the sale of Works Australia, a business unit of the Department of Administrative Services, which provided project, architectural and engineering design and documentation services to the Commonwealth and State Governments and private enterprise. The objectives of the audit were to review the efficiency and effectiveness of the management of the sale.

The audit's objective was to assess, and report to Parliament on, the ATO's administration of petroleum excise collections. The audit examined whether the ATO had implemented effectively administrative arrangements for the collection of petroleum excise since the transfer of the function from Customs in 1999. Areas that were examined relating to administration of petroleum excise were:

• governance arrangements;
• licensing arrangements;
• compliance management;
• investigations; and
• revenue management.

The audit also reviewed the role of Customs in performing functions directly related to petroleum excise collections and key elements of the management relationship between the ATO and Customs in this area.

The audit reviewed the sales of DASFLEET, Works Australia and DAS Interiors Australia. Separate audit reports have been produced for each of the sales. This report focuses on the management of the overall sale processes for all business units.

The overall objective of this audit was to assess the management of the physical protection of Australian missions and staff overseas. The high-level criteria for the audit are set out at Appendix 1 of the report.

Causes and Consequences of Personnel Postings in the Australian Defence Force The audit arose from a Defence Efficiency Review (1997) recommendation that Defence could make savings on the large volume of postings it made every year. The audit examined the posting process and sought to provide assurance that Defence had identified and examined salient postings issues and was addressing them effectively.

This audit is one of a series of fraud control audits undertaken by the ANAO. The audit focussed on Centrelink's arrangements for the prevention, detection and treatment of incorrect payments to its customers. The objective of the audit was to assess whether Centrelink had implemented appropriate fraud control arrangements in line with the Fraud Control Policy of the Commonwealth.

Allegations were made to the Senate Economics References Committee that the Australian Taxation Office and Australian Customs Service (Customs) had failed to pursue several cases of detected sales tax fraud. The Committee believed that this alleged failure may have stemmed from coordination problems between the two agencies. The Committee requested the Auditor-General to investigate this matter and report his findings to the Parliament.

The audit examined whether the Department of Health and Ageing had the performance information necessary to administer the Australian Health Care Agreements. A strong focus of the audit was accountability for performance given the significant size of Commonwealth financial assistance, more than $29.6 billion over 5 years, provided to the States and Territories for the provision of health care services.

The objective of the audit was to assess the effectiveness of the Australian Taxation Office in achieving revenue commitments established under specific Budget-funded compliance measures.

Mr P.J. Barrett (AM) - Auditor-General for Australia, presented a speech on the occasion of the release by the Minister for Finance of the Second Trial Unaudited Financial Statements for the Commonwealth of Australia for the year ended 30 June 1996.