Annual accountability

Every year, your organisation is required to report how you’ve complied with key elements of the contract with us and used the funding received from DCJ. There are separate requirements for reporting annual accountability at the corporate and contract levels.

Corporate-level accountability requires you to report financial health at the whole-of-organisation level, declare compliance with your ongoing responsibilities and contractual obligations, and address requirements for any annual accountability focus areas required for the financial year.

Only one corporate-level accountability submission is required, regardless of the number of separate contracts you held during the accountability reporting period.

Contract-level accountability requires you to report income and expenditure against the funding your organisation received from DCJ, declare unspent funds, and certify you met the financial responsibilities and contractual obligations for the reported financial year.

Separate contract-level accountability submissions are required for each contract you held during the accountability reporting period.

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

We may contact you one or more times during this process.

Checking and accepting your submissions

Our priority is to verify you’ve answered all questions on the forms and uploaded all the required documents.

Then we’ll 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’ll 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 submitted income and expenditure statement
• we need to make arrangements with you to recover unspent funds.

‘Accepting’ a submission means we acknowledge its receipt and that we’ve completed these preliminary checks. While conducting the performance and risk assessments, we may still contact you about information in, or documents uploaded with your submission.

Conducting annual performance and risk assessments

We conduct annual performance and risk assessments at the corporate and contract levels.

To do this, we:

• conduct a full financial analysis of your reported accountability and review your performance over the previous 12 months to identify any issues which may affect your ability to deliver services
• assess the level of risk, based on whether any issues were identified and their severity
• take the initial actions necessary to assist you to address any issues.

The assessments are based on your annual accountability submission, your regular performance reporting, and other information gathered during your interaction with DCJ over the previous 12 months.

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.

For 2020–21, 97.63% of the performance and risk assessments were rated low, medium or no risk, meaning only 2.37% of assessments were classified as high or very high risk. The assessments confirmed that most organisations are performing well and meeting their contractual obligations.

The annual accountability overview and process description:

• describes the process we follow
• provides more detail about the annual performance and risk assessments
• explains when formal improvement plans may be required, according to the risk rating.