The Commonwealth Ombudsman has alerted the media to problems with Federal Government emergency financial handouts and other grants.
ABC News on 5 August 2009:
The Commonwealth Ombudsman has criticised the lack of accountability governing emergency financial handouts and other grants by federal departments.
The grants for schemes such as bushfire aid, drought relief and redundancy benefits are not controlled by legislation.
The ombudsman, Professor John McMillan, says this provides flexibility when money needs to be handed out urgently.But it has also led to problems such as unpublished closing dates for applications, ambiguous rules for handing out the money and poor decisions by bureaucrats which cannot be corrected.
Prof MacMillan says while executive schemes can be set up quickly, the public can suffer.
He has criticised the lack of accountability governing emergency financial handouts and other grants by federal departments.
He has recommended a series of measures to improve accountability, including the publication of up to date information about the schemes and procedures for complaint handling.
While the Ombudsman cites ambiguous rules for handing out the money and poor decisions by bureaucrats, he fails to mention that this situation also appears to allow for widespread rorting of the emergency payment system in which government coffers rather than the public suffer.
On the NSW North Coast it is an open secret that a number of successful applications for the 2009 one-off $1,000 per flood victim emergency payment (administered through Centrelink) were made by residents who were not living in homes or on land affected by flooding this year.
Indeed one person supposedly made a successful claim while residing in a house which is approximately 41 metres above sea level on land that could never experience river flooding due to its height.
It is understood that government is aware of this far from novel situation and that in past years it had been informed of similar fraud.
