Last month we attended the Don't Become The Headline webinar that offered public servants the dos and don’ts of procurement.

Presented by Victoria’s Integrity Champions, the webinar featured important insights from a panel of three senior Victorian figures: The Honourable Robert Redlich AM QC (IBAC Commissioner), Deborah Glass (Victorian Ombudsman), and Andrew Greaves (Victorian Auditor-General). Starting from the premise that it is easy for your department or agency to be splashed across the headlines – for all the wrong reasons!, the webinar offered the more than 1,000 attendees ways to ensure Victorian government departments and agencies followed above-board procurement practices to maintain integrity.

Deborah Glass, who shared several compelling case studies her office had recently investigated, offered the following advice:

• “Small private misuse can become a large public scandal.”
• Active oversight is important, so “make sure you really know what your staff are doing.”
• Needing to get the job done quickly is not an adequate excuse: “processes exist for good reason.”
• “Conflicts of interest are common and are not inherently a bad thing, but they must be openly declared and managed. Poor management of conflict of interest, deliberate or otherwise, leaves an organisation vulnerable to charges that can damage their integrity.”
• Senior officials must lead by example and know and understand the requirements.

Glass concluded that a healthy and ethical workplace culture is crucial. This included making sure staff:

1. model best practice
2. realise that unethical practice will not be tolerated
3. know how to raise concerns and understand how complaints can be handled.

For Glass, the cost of getting things wrong is significant. There is a personal cost for individuals involved, and loss of organisational reputation. Importantly, the loss of public trust is also at stake.

Robert Redlich AM QC, encouraged attendees to constantly reinforce policy and improve policy implementation within procurement teams. “It is never good enough to just have a good policy,” he said. “Policy must be implemented, and organisations must ensure that staff who are responsible for procurement are thoroughly familiar with policy, and know the requirements of that policy. This can only be achieved by training and constant reinforcement of the policy and the processes that must be followed.”

Redlich AM QC also noted that complaints received by IBAC about misconduct or corruption, often involve non-compliance. He suggested that constant reinforcement and reminders of policy and implementation mitigated the risk of non-compliance in procurement processes. Andrew Greaves later echoed this point. He noted that processes for managing and developing people created a controlled environment, which could form the basis for all other control systems in procurement. As he observed, corporate culture can hinder or enable procurement and conflict of interest processes. It is in everyone’s interest that the public sector seeks to ensure fair procurement and to build corruption resistant processes and checks, to avoid becoming a headline.

In closing, Greaves advised agencies to “create designs to prevent the wrong thing from being done. Make sure the right thing is done in the first place.”

If you haven’t updated your procurement and conflict of interest checks and balances, there is never a better time to do so than now!

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You can watch a recording of the Don't Become A Headline webinar here.

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A participant in the UN Global Compact, CourtHeath seeks to raise awareness about the Sustainable Development Goals and the principles of the Global Compact with business and government organisations in Victoria

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IMAGE: Used under licence from shutterstock.com

[category courtheath's blog]

[procurement, conflict of interest, Victoria]