Chamber and committees

Surely it would have been easy to get documentation for that; there would be bills from the restaurants, hotels or whatever. Whether those complied with policy is a different thing, but they would be able to produce the piece of paper. How difficult is that?

No, it still does not make it clean.

I will leave that particular aspect aside. Were the policies in place considered by the audit and found to be adequate? I would expect that looking at policies and at adherence to those policies to be part of the audit process.

In the course of the audit, was any request made to the senior management team to see whether it could backfill that information?

Do you know whether the body has tried to find those receipts?

A question that leads on from that is whether any work has been done to review expense claims from previous years.

Finally, without mentioning names, which positions comprise the senior management of the commission?

Good morning. I would like to get a bit of perspective here by referring back to the work of the Economy, Energy and Fair Work Committee in session 5. That committee heard concerns that the practice of procuring through large contracts could make it harder for smaller or newer firms to access opportunities, despite the practice of dividing contracts into lots. I assume that that sort of thing still goes on. Do you have views on such practices and how they are impacting on business? What are some of the challenges that framework contracts can throw up?

Perhaps we can start with you, Colin.

Is that approach pushing smaller businesses into subcontracting from a larger business that has taken the main contract?

Are there any other issues with framework contracts, or have we covered the one big issue?