Giving the ACT procurement board "a bit more teeth" so it could insist on changes to procurement processes would clear up some of the long-running issues in the system, the Auditor-General has said.
More compulsory training for ACT public servants involved in making procurement decisions would also help address the problems.
Requiring officials who ignore the advice of the ACT's procurement board to write and publish their reasons for doing so would also "go a long way" to improving the way procurement decisions are made.
Michael Harris said he had not discovered any evidence of deliberate misconduct in procurements subject to performance audits.
"I've reserved my opinion in relation to CIT because I'm not investigating those aspects of CIT; the Integrity Commissioner is," he said.
The Integrity Commission is examining contracts awarded to a "complexity and systems thinker", consultant Patrick Hollingworth, over a five-year period by the Canberra Institute of Technology for advice on organisation transformation.
Mr Harris said he had not resolved in his mind the tension between a director-general's responsibilities under the ACT's Financial Management Act and their responsibilities under procurement laws.
"That's a policy question clearly the government will need to address. I'm sure there's an answer to it," Mr Harris told a budget estimates hearing on Tuesday.
Mr Harris also revealed the Audit Office had been investigating the government's long-running human resources system replacement project.
The government revealed in June it had decided to abandon the uncompleted project after spending $76 million. A review had found the project was "deficient" from the start and it had been plagued with significant governance issues.
"We were in the throes of a performance audit in relation to that project when the government made its announcement during the budget process," Mr Harris said.
"That's caused us to revisit the scope of the work that we're doing and the nature of the work that we're doing. But that will be tabled this financial year, certainly; I would hope before the end of the calendar year but it may be early 2024."
Mr Harris said he thought the Audit Office was coming to the end of a cycle of procurement audits.
"It's fair to say my initial thoughts in this regard were the majority of issues related to lack of expertise within the public sector and, combined with a lack of frequency with which they dealt with particularly large procurements and the nature of the territory," he said.
Mr Harris said the advent of Major Projects Canberra had mitigated some problems because it had the required expertise to manage larger procurement processes.
The lack of practice of completing larger procurements in the ACT had resulted in problems, he said.
"Procurement ACT has an exceptional range of guidelines and policies and procedures, and if they're followed by practitioners, it's very difficult to see how you would get into trouble with a procurement of any size," Mr Harris said.
"But the simple fact is on many occasions, we've discovered people have not followed the guidelines, the procedures, the policies that are in place or taken the advice of the procurement board when they're offered it."
Mr Harris said a "significant amount of difficulty that's been experienced would be avoided" if procurement laws were amended to clarify the role of the territory's procurement board.
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