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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 1 Hansard (18 February) . . Page.. 76 ..

MR STEFANIAK (continuing):

Generally speaking, the reports reviewed by this committee were informative and accessible. However, the confusion of function that seems to affect many annual reports was very evident.

Annual reports are supposed to report activity and outcomes against agency objectives for the financial year. In a number of cases, agencies also use their annual reports as promotional documents or guides to a range of services offered. I highlight as an example the police report, which is certainly highly informative, but also contained long passages of descriptive material not directly related to any particular outcome for the year under review. The financial reporting, and reporting of performance against agreed targets, was tucked away at Appendix 1 and did not appear to have any cross-referencing from the descriptive reporting and text of the report.

With regard to annual reporting, the committee believes that reports should give prominence to the outcome against the agreed performance measures. If the figures quoted in the text are relevant and useful, perhaps they should be included as performance measures. We acknowledge that some agencies may wish to produce documents which describe the services they provide and the context in which they work, and consider issues with regard to their operations in a more discursive way and over a longer period that is appropriate in annual reports. I think it would be better if these later types of documents could be produced separately, allowing their content to reflect both their purpose and their target audience. As a result of that, we came up with our first recommendation there, which I want to deal with.

Most of the reports had no qualifications by auditors but the policing report did in fact have an auditor qualification in relation to what it described as inadequate reporting systems and no reported results. An example given was that these performance measures were expressed numerically, as a percentage of domestic violence cases requiring further police action, or percentage of people who rated VLO assistance as satisfactory or higher.

The auditor noted that there were nil returns against the various performance measures which reflected results which could not be verified due to inadequate systems, or the absence of a measurement system to record the result, or the performance measure itself was deemed to be mis-specified.

We, as a committee, noted that some of these measures-especially those relating to satisfaction with a particular service-are not easy to gauge, and that they must contain a significant level of subjectivity, but that where a performance measure is included that is purely numerical, it should either be reported against or dropped. For example, the percentage of domestic violence cases requiring further police action was not reported against because the collection of data "required intensive manual work which directed resources from other priorities". We thought that, if a system cannot be put in place which records the necessary information within an acceptable resource application, then the measure should be reviewed and replaced.

One performance measure of interest to the committee was the percentage of hearing briefs of evidence rejected by the DPP. That had not been reported on because there was no process for rejection of hearing briefs provided to the DPP.

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