How DCJ reviews and assesses the information you submit

Your annual accountability submission is a key input to the process of reviewing and assessing your performance.

Reviewing your submissions

When we receive your submission, our priority is to verify you’ve answered all questions on the forms and uploaded all the required documents.

Then we perform a preliminary review and crosscheck of the financial information to ensure it’s been reported as required and to address any inconsistencies as soon as possible.

In addition, we organise recovery of unspent funds, if required.

We’ll contact you if:

• there’s incomplete or missing information on a form
• documents haven’t been either filled in correctly, signed or uploaded
• there’s incomplete or inconsistent financial information; for example, figures typed in the contract-level accountability form don’t agree with figures in the income and expenditure statement you submitted
• we need to make arrangements with you to recover unspent funds.

In addition, we organise recovery of unspent funds, if required.

Conducting annual accountability assessments

Our approach to assessing accountability

We conduct annual accountability assessments at the corporate and contract levels.

The assessments are designed to build a snapshot of your performance over the previous 12 months, and analyse your reported accountability.

We’ve defined a set of criteria as the basis for the assessments. Each criterion addresses an aspect of governance, financial management or service delivery. The criteria may change from year to year.

You’re required to submit financial statements as part of corporate-level accountability. Financial statements give us an indication of your organisation’s general financial health. We use this information when we assess the corporate-level financial management criteria. The ongoing viability of your organisation is important to us because we want to maintain stable service delivery.

If focus areas are included for the reported financial year, we review any material submitted, if it was requested by us. Our interest in this material is to verify its currency and to satisfy us that relevant practices are in place to minimise the risk of instability to, or interruption of services. It isn’t DCJ’s role to endorse this material or the practices described in it.

You’re required to submit an income and expenditure statement as part of contract-level accountability. We use the income and expenditure statement when we assess the contract-level financial management criteria. This is to verify that funding was spent as agreed in the contract.

We’ll contact you if there are any financial discrepancies or other matters to be clarified.

Note that under our contract with you, we can audit or review your accounts at any time, even though we’ve accepted the financial reporting of your annual accountability submission.

How we assess the criteria

For each assessment criterion, we determine whether we have concerns about your organisation which may affect its ability to deliver services to our clients.

To do this, we:

• review and analyse the information you submitted for your annual accountability reporting, including any annual accountability focus areas
• consider your achievements, performance, issue and risk management during the previous 12 months
• use our general knowledge of your organisation and your service delivery practices, as well as consider communication and engagement with you over the previous 12 months.

If concerns are identified, we rate their severity. We state the reason for the severity rating given and, if necessary, provide evidence to support that reasoning. We may contact you with questions or to request further information before we apply a rating.

Significant concerns related to the financial management and focus area criteria (if included) are escalated within DCJ for further analysis and, if necessary, a detailed review or investigation.

Based on the outcome of the assessments, we:

• determine whether any issues and/or risks must be registered for management and monitoring
• review and, if necessary, adjust your corporate and/or contract-level indicators
• determine whether a formal Performance Improvement Plan is required to manage any issues.

Initiating actions in response to any concerns

We notify you when your annual accountability assessments have been completed.

If any concerns were identified during the assessments, we ask to meet with you to discuss them and plan a course of action to address them.

This meeting ensures transparency of the accountability process and its outcome, and provides the opportunity to:

• clarify the situation
• establish your awareness of any issues and/or risks we identified
• discuss any measures already being taken to address these issues and risks
• work collaboratively with you to resolve matters.

Together, we determine whether you:

• can resolve an issue or treat a risk using your own resources or by changing your practices
• require the support of your DCJ contract manager, who may direct you to resources that may assist you.

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