More analysis on the Immigration Department's $8 Billion in contracts for last calendar year
Tuesday, 05 March 2013
You'll recall that last week Fran and Neville sent in the 96 page spreadsheet detailing the Department of Immigration and Citizenship's contracts in force, or entered into from 1 January, 2012 to 31 December, 2012 and only listing contracts in excess of $100,000.
That spreadsheet was unfathomable to me. The total contract value was $8 billion - huge money in anyone's terms, and certainly worthy of much more analysis.
Well, reader Dennis has done that further analysis. He has produced a magnificent Excel workbook with a couple of very useful worksheets.
I'll let Dennis explain in his own words,
The first worksheet has a tab name "By Contractor By Subject" and shows totals for each contractor/supplier (rows 4 to 2292).
On the bottom half of this worksheet, I have tried to sort and total by Subject. However, this has not been completely succesful because the descriptors in this column are not consistent. I would need to go through each row and assign a unique code alongside each row. I'm not sure that the amount of time it would take would amount to anything all that meaningful.
Still, I was curious about a few of the subjects, particularly "ICT Contractors"; "Air Charters" and "Leases", so I have managed to get totals for these. You can navigate to them by selecting the name box, drop down arrow (it will be showing A1). The ICT Contractors run to 1,100 rows.
The second worksheet has a tab name "By Contractor Summary" and is simply a summarised listing of payments derived from the first worksheet.
An interesting observation is that there was a contract in the amount of $528,000 to the Footscray Football Club. Not suggesting anything untoward or sinister of course.
And the spending with American Express & the CBA - a total of $18.8 million for corporate and transactional banking services and merchant fees on credit card transactions - wow!
How on earth would any organisation find the skills to manage and hold contractors to performance standards with so large a number of contracts? How often do you reckon each contractor is visited by the department - say the Footscray Football Club? With that number of contracts and the inevitable variations and changes in so dynamic an environment as that of our evolving maritime asylum seeker arrivals "process" - it's hard to imagine that money isn't "leaking".