Auditor-General Grant Hehir has announced a review into the government's procurement of services on Manus Island.
After weeks of media and parliamentary revelations about short-circuited tender processes and lucrative contracts issued to controversial companies,Auditor-General Grant Hehir on Monday confirmed his new audit in a letter to Labor’s immigration spokesman Shayne Neumann.
“This audit will assess whether the Department of Home Affairs has appropriately managed the procurement of garrison support and welfare services for immigration processing centres."
The audit is forecast to be tabled in Parliament in January 2020.
The audit will examine the background to the $423 million in security contracts awarded by Home Affairs to little known security company,the Paladin Group,for garrison services at asylum seeker camps on Papua New Guinea's Manus Island following the October 2017 closure of the regional processing centre.
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Paladin was the only company approached by Home Affairs for the work and was given just six days to lodge its costings with the department after a PNG-run tender process collapsed in mid-2017.
It gained notoriety by having until recently a beach shack on South Australia’s Kangaroo Island as its Australian head office. But Home Affairs officials told a Senate estimates hearing in February that the department had been mostly happy with Paladin’s performance.
Mr Hehir’s audit team will also examine an $82 million contract topolitically connected PNG landowner company NKW Holdings to feed and house asylum seekers on Manus Island. This works out to be about $1400 per day for each of the 209 men at West Lorengau Haus and Hillside Haus.