Page 2224 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 28 August 2007
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… what I had to face was whether or not we were prepared to pay the salary. It is not at the moment, in my consideration, commensurate with the level of experience. For example, people with maybe one year’s experience were asking for $70,000 to $80,000 per year. Graduates were asking for $50,000 a year. I did not think that we should be prepared to pay that. I did not want to react to the market and then have to live with that reactive decision for years to come because we still had to train staff, we still had to make sure they had the capacity to do the work.
It may be that the market for audit staff will cool down and opportunities may present themselves later. I will leave that assessment to the Auditor-General herself and those who are more familiar with that particular profession from which she is seeking to recruit.
We do have a very sensible Auditor-General who is inclined to weigh up these matters very carefully. It is refreshing to hear someone in government explain that their problems cannot simply be solved with the provision of more funds. Obviously, this is a difficult area. There is not always an easy solution when staff in your area of business or activity are in high demand and are able to demand salaries that are above what you are willing to pay. But one thing is clear: what we do need to do now is to ensure that the Auditor-General is able to work as efficiently as possible with the staff she has. We must be careful that the work required of the office is worth while and we must give them the flexibility to weight competing projects sensibly.
Whilst I understand her resistance to recruiting people at what appear to be excessive salaries based on experience, there is a point of reality that one has to address: if that is what the market is demanding, even for the level of experience cited, one may have to accept that situation because we are in a highly competitive labour market in the ACT. The demand for graduates is considerable from both the private sector and the commonwealth. High turnover is also a contributing factor to inefficiency and loss of continuity.
Unfortunately, there are worrying signs that government is not operating in a fashion that will ensure that the office can operate as efficiently as possible and may be aggravating difficulties faced by the Auditor-General. For example, the budget reports that audits will now be conducted in accordance with a new and revised national auditing standard, which is detailed on page 27 of budget paper No 4. The matter was discussed in estimates committee hearings on 18 June. The Auditor-General will now be required to report on matters which are not important in forming a judgement on the audit. As Mr Sheville from the Auditor-General’s office put it in estimates hearings on 18 June:
… many audit procedures are now required to be performed regardless of whether the auditor formally holds the view that they add value or not.
This is a worrying development. Firstly, it adds additional work and cost to the auditor for no clear benefit. Secondly, one suspects that it will now lead to less targeted audit reports, where the auditor has to trawl through pages of irrelevant facts before coming to the key and most useful parts.
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