Mr Ian McPhee - Auditor-General for Australia, presented at the CPA Congress

The aim of Insights: Audit Lessons is to communicate lessons from our audit work and to make it easier for people working within the Australian public sector to apply those lessons.

This edition of Insights: Audit Lessons is targeted at risk practitioners and officials responsible for government operations, projects, programs, services and regulatory activities. It would also be useful for accountable authorities, their senior executives and audit and risk committees.

To assess the extent to which agencies create, manage and dispose of records in accordance with key business, legal and policy requirements.

The agencies included in the audit were the: Australian Customs and Border Protection Service (Customs); Department of Immigration and Citizenship (DIAC); and the Department of the Treasury (Treasury). The audit also considered the Archives' response to Recommendation No. 1 from ANAO Audit Report No.6 2006, 07 Recordkeeping including the Management of Electronic Records, including whether they had clarified Australian Government records management requirements for agencies.

The Auditor-General responded on 31 July 2025 to correspondence from Senator Andrew Bragg dated 3 July 2025, requesting that the Auditor-General conduct an investigation to examine Housing Australia Future Fund's financial performance to 30 June 2025.

The Auditor-General received further clarification correspondence from Senator Andrew Bragg dated 6 August 2025. The Auditor-General provided a clarification response to Senator Bragg on 17 September 2025.

The ANAO first examined asset management in the general government sector in 1995. The outcome of that review was presented in Audit Report No. 27, 1995-96, Asset Management. The primary objectives of the current review were to:

• ascertain the degree of acceptance of the previous audit recommendations;
• establish the extent to which organisations were managing their assets in accordance with the asset management principles espoused in the Asset Management Handbook; and
• examine any central coordination initiatives in asset management.

Meeting these objectives permits the ANAO to express an updated opinion on the state of asset management in the general government sector other than for specialised military equipment.

The overall objective of the audit was to assess the effectiveness of Refresh and, in particular:

• the extent to which Centrelink has used the funds invested by the Government to develop its IT capability and realise the anticipated service delivery, financial and other benefits; and
• how Centrelink's programme management approach and Refresh's oversight arrangements have contributed to the achievement of the outcomes of the programme.

The audit’s objective was to assess the effectiveness of the selection, contracting and ongoing management of investments by the Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC) and the extent to which the CEFC is meeting its legislated objective.

The objective of the audit was to assess whether the Bureau of Meteorology is effectively managing assets in its observing network.

The objective of the audit was to assess whether protective security functions in selected organisations were being effectively managed. In considering effectiveness, the audit assessed whether protective security arrangements: - were designed within the context of the business framework and the related security risks identified by the organisation; and - provided an appropriate level of support for the organisation's operations and the delivery of its services.