The Australian National University should improve its record management, capital works framework and performance reporting arrangements, the Australian National Audit Office has found.
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The ANAO performance audit, which examined the operations of the ANU Council, council committees and the academic board from January 2018 to July 2021, found the university governance was not supported by an appropriate information management system.
Officers said ANU's electronic records management system was not user friendly and so a combination of group folders, network drives and SharePoint sites were used to generate, store and distribute information.
In October 2021, ANU advised ANAO it has a new system which would integrate SharePoint documents to the record management system but the ANAO found the use of network drives was not consistent with best practice standards and undermined the quality and completeness of information.
The ANAO report said despite the university having approved capital works worth more than $900 million over a six-year rolling program, a controls review completed by EY found "fit-for-purpose capital planning, approval and monitoring processes were not in place."
The auditor referenced the case of the Student Accommodation No.8 project (SA8). The Council approved the design and $166.2 million in funding in 2018 for the project and it was expected to deliver 1000 beds by the beginning of 2021.
However, the project was plagued with delays caused by boundary disputes, design changes and delays to acquiring land from the ACT government.
The SA8 project was paused in April 2020 at the onset of the pandemic, but the report said it would have been paused regardless due to the litany of other problems.
"The Campus Planning Committee were also advised that no one individual had been accountable for the project and insufficient reporting had been provided to the committee responsible for oversight of the project," the ANAO report said.
The ANAO identified there were not clear reporting lines between the senior management, the council, council committees and the academic board and communication relied on informal practices that were not consistently documented.
The ANU's corporate plan, which it called a strategic plan, was not fully compliant with the requirements of the Public Governance, Performance and Accountability Act.
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The key performance indicators in the strategic plan did not have clear links with key initiatives and were not all related, measurable and complete to allow for an accurate assessment of its performance.
The report said the "performance statements do not collectively address the extent to which the university has achieved its purpose" and "do not reflect the characteristics of good performance information as identified by the Department of Finance".
The nomination committee and remuneration committee had not conducted a self-assessment on their governance processes since 2018 as required under the Voluntary Code of Best Practice for the Governance of Australian Public Universities.
In December 2018, ANU entered into an agreement to purchase a new management tracking and reporting tool and signed a $1 million contract for the service in 2020. However, the colleges and service divisions hadn't uploaded their business plans and risk assessments by October 2021.
The ANAO found that annual reports included remuneration of key management personnel, senior executives and highly paid staff but, except for the vice-chancellor role, did not detail the remuneration policies and the basis on which remuneration had been determined.
The audit found that the ANU Council was unaware of the remuneration of the board of a commercial subsidiary, ANU Enterprise.
"The Australian National University should ensure that the governance arrangements of its subsidiaries are fit-for-purpose and improve the reporting framework to support the Council's oversight of financial and non-financial risks relating to its subsidiary, the ANU Enterprise Pty Ltd," the report said.
In March 2019, an internal audit found fraud risks were not sufficiently identified and assessed, there was a lack of fraud awareness among staff, potential fraud was not being reported properly or at all and there was a lack of documented processes and procedures for dealing with fraud. As at October 2021, five of the six recommendations from this audit were still not implemented.
"The planned revision of the fraud risk framework planned for 2019 to 2021 has not yet been undertaken. Additionally, fraud risk assessments, fraud control testing, reporting and controls self-assessment activities have not been completed as required," the report said.
The ANU has accepted the ANAO's six recommendations.
In a response to the draft report, Chancellor Julie Bishop said the enormity of the challenges confronting the university during the performance audit, including bushfires, smoke, a hailstorm and COVID-19, could not be overstated.
"As part of an established culture of continuous improvement, the ANU has immediately commenced planning to implement each recommendation," Ms Bishop said.
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