Page 5306 - Week 14 - Wednesday, 29 November 2017
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I have been asked about the trust fund. One should not rely on everything one reads in the Canberra Times. I can report that in January 2016 an anomaly was identified by ACT Corrective Services in the reconciliation of the AMC detainee trust account. In March 2016 the directorate proactively engaged KPMG Forensic to assist with the identification of the value of any shortfall and the root causes of any such anomaly. The report provided by KPMG concluded that there was “no clear evidence identified to date to indicate that any fraud has actually occurred”.
KPMG did make a range of recommendations, and a number of risk mitigation strategies have been introduced. They include an upgrade to the financial software supporting the AMC trust account, the redesign of the workflow and implementation of the balancing of subsidiary accounts, establishing individual detainee accounts, the provision of accurate journalling in the JACS operating account and the development of appropriate end-of-month processes. The introduction of a cashless system at the AMC has eliminated administrative and accounting errors arising from handling cash, streamlined administrative and financial processes, reduced cash and paper, and improved visibility of the movement of funds for all stakeholders.
Again I refute the assertion made in this place tonight. This was all done internally and proactively as a result of ACT Corrective Services identifying a problem. They did not wait until someone in the Assembly or someone in the media identified it. Corrective Services, under my supervision, went and fixed it. As I have noted in my amendment, a fraud risk assessment was undertaken by KPMG. That was presented to the JACS audit and performance improvement committee on 28 September 2017, and they were satisfied that ACT Corrective Services put in place strong controls to mitigate the risks identified. I think that is a good piece of proactive work from Corrective Services to eliminate a flaw that was identified in the system.
I would like to talk about the diversity of staff at ACT Corrective Services, because this has been a very deliberate strategy. Twenty-five per cent of our Corrective Services officers now are women and 5.5 per cent of ACT Corrective Services staff are Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander—well above both ACT government targets and the proportion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in our community. I think it is entirely appropriate, given the over-representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in our system, that we seek to bring a greater cultural diversity to our staff. I think we have been very successful. A recent graduation program of 18 included five women and 13 men, and three of the graduates in that program identified as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander. Again, that excellent work that has been put in place by Corrective Services to deliberately strive to encourage a diversity of staff to apply and come into the Corrective Services system has been very successful. I commend them for their work on that.
Far from the suggestions that Mrs Jones has made tonight, I think that short list of comments that I have just made—and I have outlined a number of others in my amendment—identifies that Corrective Services is working on a continuous improvement program.
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