Audit This
Something goes wrong. Money disappears, or a project blows out, or a claim turns out not to be true. And there is always a moment, somewhere back down the line, where a person was supposed to be checking. Audit This finds that moment. One story an episode, followed all the way to the end of it. Frauds, collapses, cost blowouts, contracts, cover ups, and the occasional thing that everybody accepted as true because nobody went and looked. Every episode is built from the record: court transcripts, sentencing remarks, corruption commission findings, Hansard, auditor general reports, annual reports, contracts, and the documents that were sitting in plain sight the whole time. No speculation. No dramatisation. No guessing at what anyone was thinking. Just the paperwork, read out loud, in the order it happened.
Episodes
Under one line of federal law, a spare room in Canberra counts as a hotel. Not like a hotel. "Taken to be commercial accommodation", whether it is or not.
This episode reads the rules that decide what federal politicians are paid and what public money they can spend: the salary, the electorate allowance, the car, the travel allowance, the office budget's shopping list, and the authority that was built in 2017...
In 2008, a new shape appeared on a map of New South Wales. A coal exploration area called Mount Penny, in the Bylong Valley.
Years later, the minister responsible was asked, at a public inquiry, how he knew where to put it. He said he was pretty good at geography.
When Mount Penny was granted, its boundary covered, in the corruption commission's own words, "the vast majority" of a cattle property a pol...
Go and find your last payslip. There is a line on it you have almost certainly never checked. It says tax.
Between 2014 and 2017 a payroll company in Sydney collected $141,291,923 in tax withheld from ordinary workers' pay. It kept $105,625,304 of it.
Plutus Payroll advertised itself as free. It was free because the fee came out of the tax. Every worker got a payslip saying the tax had been paid.
Between January and July 2017, two family day care services in western Sydney looked after 2,132 children.
They claimed 398,936 sessions of care. That is more than two and a half thousand sessions of childcare every working day, for seven months. In one month alone they enrolled more than 1,600 children, about three quarters of their entire book, in about four weeks.
Not one session happened. Not one c...
In 2011 a finance officer at Queensland Health sat down to do the most boring job in government. He found a payment he did not recognise, typed the vendor's name into a free government website, and eight seconds later he had uncovered the largest fraud in the state's history.
Two and a half thousand kilometres away, a senior public servant in Western Australia had already been doing the same thing for three y...
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