Federal Auditor-General Ian McPhee will ditch a proposed preliminary inquiry in favour of a full performance audit into the first $4.7 billion National Broadband Network Request for Proposal (RFP) process.
McPhee gave his nod to the audit yesterday in a letter to Shadow Minister for Communications Nick Minchin, who has pushed for an audit into the process since the government's 7 April decision to ditch the process and go it alone on a substantially larger initiative.
The performance audit is expected to commence in late June rather than May as it had been scheduled previously as a Preliminary Inquiry and will be complete by early 2010. It will examine the background to and how the department conducted the RFP process, management of risks associated with the process and outcome, and stakeholder consultations, according to McPhee's correspondence to Minchin.
"The Rudd Government wasted almost 18 months and around $20 million on this process," Minchin said in a statement today. "Tenderers also spent millions of dollars on their submissions to a fatally-flawed process."
The performance audit and subsequent report could potentially mean exposure of some portions of the NBN Expert Panel and ACCC documents, which the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy has kept under wraps due to "commercial in confidence" information it claimed is contained within the documents.
The government had been required by a Senator Order to release the documents once the RFP process was complete, however, decided not to release them due to the process being terminated.
The department has knocked back one Freedom of Information request to access the documents, and is yet to respond to a second lodged by Minchin last month.
