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
8 episodes
Subject to Government Approval
Australia planned twelve submarines. By Defence's own count it spent $3.4 billion on the program, and it never got a submarine.Twenty days before the cancellation, the head of the program emailed the Secretary of Defence. The largest de...
NDIS Fraud: The Ten Worst Cases and Who Caught Them
Last financial year, the NDIS paid out $51.5 billion. Before paying, the agency's staff checked about 0.4 per cent of the money by hand. Four dollars in every thousand.This episode follows the National Disability Insurance Scheme from t...
The File Said So
Two private colleges in Melbourne reported lessons that were never taught, and Victoria paidfor every hour of them.On the 5th of July 2015, the timetable at one of them listed six classes. The footage fromthat day shows one pers...
Taken To Be
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 wha...
The Vast Majority
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 wa...
Free Because It Should Be
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,...
Two Thousand Children, None of Them Real
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 seve...
27 Million Dollars, Nobody Asked
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 large...
