Government grants worth a billion dollars a year are often wasted, according to an in-depth study by one of the country's top accountancy experts. The grants go to companies which do not perform well, a study done at the Institute of Public Accountants at Deakin University found.
The professor of accountancy there said the findings indicated there may be a "grant mentality" or a "grant culture" in some firms which get government grants. He criticized the way the Commonwealth government gives out money, calling it "opaque" so that whether public money was being wasted was hard to assess.
The academics tracked the performance of 141,800 firms that received a total of $4.2 billion in Commonwealth government grants from 2018 to 2022.
