No political smokescreen will hide Callaghan’s embarrassing spending

5 OCTOBER 2018
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Callaghan Innovation’s complaints about the volume of information requests from the Taxpayers’ Union do nothing to justify the agency’s culture of waste – including $3 million spent on entertainment, flights and accommodation in one year.

Taxpayers’ Union Executive Director Jordan Williams says “Callaghan Innovation represents the worst excesses of corporate welfare – their budget is devoted to handing out millions of dollars in grants to businesses. The Taxpayers’ Union makes no apology for investigating and uncovering the culture of corporate largess that disrespects hard-working taxpayers who have to pay for it all.”

“Our results speak for themselves: the public exposure of Callaghan’s spending led to a Ministerial rebuke and a policy change that will save taxpayer money year on year for as long as the agency exists.”

“The suggestion that there was an ‘abuse of power’ by the Taxpayers’ Union against Callaghan Innovation is laughable. Callaghan Innovation is a $300-million taxpayer-funded agency with about 380 staff. Callaghan Innovation is no victim, and while it ‘responded’ within legal timeframes, its Chair Pete Hodgson knows very well that those responses were stonewalls. It was only after the difficult decision was taken to use non-Taxpayers’ Union emails did we actually get the information we were seeking. But he is refusing to address that.”

“As for the cost of the OIAs, getting transaction information from an accounting system is a matter of a few clicks. In fact, we knew from our source that Callaghan had the information readily available. If management have wasted tens of thousands of taxpayers’ money on spin doctors and strategy meetings on how to frustrate the Union’s efforts to shine a light on spending, that is the abuse of power.”

Editor’s Note: Entertainment Expenses Information Request Timeline

The following is an example of how Callaghan Innovation has delayed and denied the release of official information to the Taxpayers’ Union.

10 August 2017 – The Taxpayers’ Union requests from Callaghan Innovation:
“A breakdown (i.e. transaction list) for all entertainment expenses in the last financial year. As well as the amounts and vendors, please include the notes/details of the entertainment expenditure, as is required for tax purposes (and presumably recorded in the accounting system against each transaction).”

8 September 2017 – Callaghan Innovation takes the full 20 days to explain that entertainment expenses cannot be released as “[they] would be releasing information about [their] total expenditure before it is published within the Callaghan Innovation 2016/17 Annual Report.”

Callaghan Innovation claims that “the information you have requested will soon be available.”

27 November 2017 – Callaghan Innovation’s 2016/17 Annual Report is made publicly available. Despite the previous claims of Callaghan Innovation, no line item figure for entertainment expenses is provided in the report, or any figure that could be interpreted as equivalent to our request for information.

ENDS

© Scoop Media