The ANAO is just another Government Department. Government auditing Government. Gee, what a surprise! The ANAO carefully scopes its audits so as to avoid sensitive, bad publicity causing areas of the government organisation it is auditing. It already knows what areas to steer clear of and which areas to look at that won’t be too bad. It’s yet another game of snakes and ladders, smoke and mirrors and a tool in the federal governments magic bag of deception and distraction. The CASA board will have some lengthy documents sitting there ready to go that will show the auditors how the Regulator is meeting their legislative requirements, meeting key targets, addressing previous findings, spending monies from the public purse compliantly and within the public service guidelines, and so the wheel spins. The previous ICAO audit gave CASA a clean bill of health (what a surprise) and the previous ANAO audit report also found CASA to be mostly a good corporate citizen, spending taxpayer monies wisely, etc etc.
So don’t get to excited peeps.The end result will be a wet lettuce leaf audit report containing a couple of minor findings, but more importantly there will be lots of mealy mouth words, charts and percentages, colourful pages and praise for our Regulator. Both auditor and Regulator will end up backslapping one another with a possible reacharound or two while they sip their herbal tea and munch on dry cruskets with avocado and alfalfa sprouts, sitting at a mahogany table with leather chairs while lauding their robust rice bowls.