Knowing how entities are progressing in implementing our recommendations gives us, parliament, our clients, and the wider Queensland community important information.

We have always asked entities to self-assess their progress, but it has been a relatively manual process involving hardcopy documents.

The Queensland Audit Office (QAO) continuously reviews how it delivers its services so we understand how we can best support our clients and give them greater insights from our work.

With this in mind, we recognise the value of, and interest in, the information we gather regarding entity progress implementing our recommendations.

We have recently developed a new online self-assessment system (the system) that allows entities to self‑assess their progress implementing our recommendations. This new system makes it easier for entities to report their progress. It:

• provides entities with a record of all QAO performance audit reports and recommendations we have made to them, including recommendations re-directed to them from recent machinery of government changes
• gives entities and audit committees clarity over their previous and current self-reported status of QAO recommendations—that is, how many recommendations they report as fully implemented, partially implemented, or not implemented
• identifies QAO recommendations made more broadly across government that may be applicable to entities and valuable to improving service delivery.

For now, we will start with the recommendations from our performance audits, but in the future we may ask entities to self-assess their progress against financial audit recommendations as well. Our system will not cover internal audit issues.

We will analyse the responses we receive from entities’ self-assessments to determine their ‘self-reported’ progress and glean insights into the performance areas we need to focus on. This will inform which audits we select for a more detailed follow-up audit and resultant report to parliament. This new system will also help us improve our future recommendations, ensuring we make them relevant, clear and timely.

For the first time, we will report to parliament on the progress entities report to us. Of course, if we mention or refer to an entity in the report, we will consult and engage on the draft report per our usual process under the Auditor-General Act 2009.

Our fact sheet Entity self-assessments on implementation of QAO recommendations provides more information about our new self-assessment system.