Here are a few paragraphs from one of its reports this week, about UK Trade and Investment, an agency something like our Austrade. UKTI (as it's known) had a consultancy agreement with prestige boutique firm PA Consulting, not unknown in Australia.

"The story of the original procurement and subsequent operation of the contract is one of a series of failings for which both parties must share the blame," the committee said in its report.

"UKTI displayed poor governance and did not keep proper records. It made a simple matter as complex as possible. It negotiated significant changes to the contract with PA when it should have gone back to the market. It pushed to sign the contract before it had finished these negotiations. All this was unfair to other bidders and left UKTI exposed to being exploited by PA.

"For its part, PA fell well short of the appropriate duty of care that we expect contractors to demonstrate when in receipt of taxpayers' money.

"Instead of looking out for its client, PA took advantage of UKTI's poor decision-making. It sold UKTI a service it is not clear it needed and failed to give the fair breakdown of its costs and profit that UKTI asked for. Instead, it used the negotiations to pass on costs to UKTI that it had said in its bid that it would bear, and to increase its profit from the contract while telling UKTI that its profit had not increased.

"The contract between UKTI and PA Consulting is a sorry saga from beginning to end. Our inquiry has been hampered by the lack of proper records ... We cannot remember a previous inquiry in which so many witnesses corrected their evidence after a public session. These events do not inspire us with confidence that we have got to the bottom of what happened.

"It is not enough to describe incompetence at a parliamentary committee, especially when information and explanations have changed before, during and after our public session. We need to see a rigorous pursuit of the truth.

"PA has not convinced us that it takes full responsibility for its actions. Its many explanations of its charges both at the time and since have been loosely worded, inconsistent and seemingly designed to obfuscate. It is unclear to us how such behaviour would be possible in a well-managed professional practice."

Thanks heavens nothing like that could ever happen here!

(Though, if it did, our own, entirely boring, predictable and tame joint-house public accounts committee, which has stretched to one report (of no moment) in the past nine months would probably not have woken for the occasion.Its one 28-page report makes copious use of "page deliberately left blank" and, at most, about 10 pages of fresh (if fairly obviously cut-and- pasted) information.)

But the British committee report was fairly mild stuff, compared with its second offering for the week. This dealt with the British tax office's management of a scheme it contracted out to an independent contractor, Concentrix, for handling "mistakes" with tax credits. The scheme, implemented with public relations fanfare by austerity-minded ministers before it had been properly field-tested, intended to cut the level of accidental error (whether by a taxpayer or the tax office) or fraud in tax returns to no more than 5.5 per cent.

A reading of what the committee called the "catastrophic" failure of the contract reads remarkably like the robo-debt story managed by our Centrelink and Department of Human Services. Even if the department has yet to admit any failures at all, other than by stupid clients.

The parallels go right down to misleading threats and ultimatums issued to "clients", bad algorithms and drawing misleading conclusions from matching incompatible data. And top management in denial, defending the manifestly indefensible. With blindness, mismanagement, and senior staff's deafness to screams from clients and the staff actually dealing with clients.

The computer geniuses at Concentrix were able to use tax data to suggest possible discrepancies, as a result of which letters were sent to clients suggesting they had been overpaid. As the Australian Department of Human Services' secretary, Kathryn Campbell, insisted of her scheme, such letters did not technically convey a premature finding of guilt (though a failure to respond was taken to involve guilt). Nor did they make improper legal threats (even if debt collectors later commissioned by the department did). The letters invited "clients" to get in touch to clear up any confusion. In Britain, as here, many of the clients did not appreciate the fine distinctions.

In Britain, as here, thousands of those who did try to get in touch found themselves in endless loops of automated telephone systems in which clients were assured their call was very important to Concentrix, but not enough, apparently to be put through. In Britain, as here, a depleted and demoralised workforce was in any event unable to cope with the extra work, particularly after the tax office (similar to Centrelink here) jumped the gun and suspended payments before processes were completed.

And in Britain, as here, pre-emptive findings of overpayment and suspensions of payments had serious follow-on consequences for thousands of citizens, including loss of welfare benefits, such as housing allowances.

(It was interesting to note that the British tax office has a target of answering 90 per cent of phone calls within five minutes. For Centrelink, it is 15 minutes. But either target was overwhelmed by the self-inflicted disasters, "communications problems" between the agency and the contractor, and senior managers' refusals to realise they had messed up.)

"Concentrix claims it expected [Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs] to stagger the 2016 terminations over several weeks ... HMRC instead terminated all 45,000 awards in one week. As a result, Concentrix was overwhelmed by the number of claimants trying to get in touch ... in August 2016 it answered just 35 per cent of calls in five minutes ...

"The problems were entirely foreseeable, as Concentrix already had backlogs of unresolved cases before the renewals process and it was failing to meet customer service standards for responding to queries.

"HMRC originally estimated that the contract would deliver £1 billion of savings, but estimated savings at November 2016 were £193 million ... Nevertheless, HMRC told us that it does not intend to involve the private sector to conduct tax credits compliance checks in the future.

"We have raised concerns with HMRC on several previous occasions about the service provided by Concentrix. In September 2015, we concluded that Concentrix's approach to obtaining large amounts of information from claimants in a short time frame and cutting off benefits from those who failed to do so was 'excessively threatening'.

"We were also concerned about Concentrix's approach of focusing on finding out whether single-parent claimants were in a relationship when they had provided relevant evidence to HMRC."

Surprise, surprise: Concentrix was, in effect, on incentive payments, getting more money the more it struck off. It wouldn't happen here, of course.

The jaded and the cynical, as well as those interested in good government, should regularly read local and international reports by audit bodies, as literature as much as edification. Many amaze; a surprising number of auditors-general (though not, alas, any at the Australian government level since Don Steele Craik) have a droll and economical way with words.

They are often funny and, even when they are not, add to the sum of knowledge about the limitless human capacity for folly, particularly in bureaucracies. In a surprising number of cases, the germ of a truly bad idea comes from within a central agency. And one can usually be sure that any innovative approach to incompetence or increasing waste elsewhere will be eagerly seized on here, probably as best practice.

We are regularly assured that the Australian Public Service stands high among its international peers for honesty, transparency, efficiency and effectiveness. These encomiums come from self-serving statements of senior bureaucrats, the Institute of Public Administration Australia, reports from consultants ever in the marketplace to hire, in retirement, the sorts of bureaucrats who commission consultants' reports, and not-entirely-disinterested experts in the OECD. Given what one can read in British audit or US General Accounting Office reports, this may well be true without saying anything very much.

There was a revolution in Australian public sector management in the late 1990s, inspiring financial management and accounting reforms, a supposed change of focus from outputs to outcomes and value for money, as well as a temporary fad of decentralising agencies and "letting the managers manage", followed by a tight concentration and politicisation of decision-making.

We've had sell-offs of public property (usually, as it will be with the forthcoming sales of East and West Block, and Anzac Park East and West, at enormous long-term cost to taxpayers). We've depleted the policy units of departments, and contracted out more and more functions, often without much in the way of public controls.

If talk about "leadership" meant leading, our senior bureaucrats would have greater fame than Napoleon's marshals. If texts containing meaningless nonsense about "risk management", "resilience", "disruption" and "agility" were on the market at 1c a paper-kilogram, the nation's GDP would double.

I am often critical of the Australian National Audit Office. To my mind, it devotes too much time preparing next-to-meaningless "desk audits," possibly in an effort to give an appearance of relentless productivity. Desk audits do not ask whether we are getting value for money, or whether there is any reality or substance behind public relations and marketing claims. Instead, they ask if there is paperwork supporting the pretence.

But even an increasingly tame watchdog can bark sometimes, if anyone is listening. Here are a few reports from the past four months that have already virtually disappeared from public view. These invite a disquiet about comfy assumptions of competent management and controls. They involve questions marks over billions of dollars in spending, and in so many agencies that politicians and the public should be alarmed. All the more so when expenditure review committees are put to further squeezing the poor to eke out the dollars.

The Audit-General's office's remarks about Immigration's woeful management would seem to apply more widely.

"Contract management is core business for Australian government entities, and the department has managed detention contracts since 1997," its report says.

"Previous ANAO audits of the department's contract management have found that its contracting framework had not established clear expectations of the level and quality of services to be delivered; and its ability to monitor the performance of contractors was compromised by a lack of clarity in standards and performance measures and reliance on incident reporting to determine when standards were not being met.

"This audit has identified a recurrence of these (and other) deficiencies, which have resulted in higher than necessary expense for taxpayers and significant reputational risks for the Australian government and the department."

Do not expect that any public service managers are losing any sleep over such remarks.

Jack Waterford is a former Canberra Times editor.