Spy agency drawn into widening KPMG scandal over contract
An Australian spy agency has been drawn into the KPMG scandal after handing a 46-million-dollar contract to the consulting firm for a project it helped design. The Australian signals directorate insists proper procurement rules were followed despite KPMG having inside knowledge it could exploit to clinch the lucrative prize.
Transcript
00:00 The ASD, as it's known, is going through a massive overhaul at the moment. It's called
00:06 Project Red Spice. It's $10 billion and it's basically going to help the ASD move to other
00:11 sites around the country - in Brisbane, in Perth and also in Melbourne. And so KPMG was
00:17 invited in a couple of years ago to help ASD design and plan what that sort of rollout
00:24 of this massive project would look like. And that, for which they were paid, they did two
00:29 years' work and they were paid $10 million, handsomely, for that work. The controversial
00:34 part here is that they were then allowed to also bid, and they won that tender, to actually
00:41 provide the rollout or the implementation of a project that they had helped design.
00:47 So this is generally frowned upon in both the consulting world but also in the government
00:53 services world, that if you help design a project, you're not allowed then to help roll
01:00 it out because, as the Auditor-General has told us on many occasions, you really have
01:05 an unfair advantage. You have sort of inside knowledge about what the government agency
01:11 wants and therefore you're in a far better position than any other tenderer to win that
01:15 contract.
01:16 [BLANK_AUDIO]