Audit Objective
This report summarises our financial audit results of the six main state and local government owned water entities, and two controlled entities. These include Seqwater, Unitywater, Queensland Urban Utilities, SunWater, Mount Isa Water Board, and Gladstone Area Water Board. Smaller water boards and local governments provide water services in designated areas and to their ratepayers respectively, and are outside the scope of this report.
Overview
In Queensland, water is primarily used by households, agriculture, mining, electricity generation, tourism, and manufacturing industries. Queensland’s state and local government owned water entities provide water throughout the state, and comprise bulk water suppliers, retailers, distributors, local governments, and smaller water boards.
Within South East Queensland, Seqwater sells treated bulk water to 12 local council regions, either directly to councils or through Distributor-Retailer Authorities (Unitywater and Queensland Urban Utilities).
Outside of South East Queensland, SunWater operates much of the bulk water infrastructure that supplies irrigators and industrial customers. For retail customers, water is sourced, treated and distributed by local government owned infrastructure (water boards). These water boards also provide bulk water to large irrigators and industrial customers.
Audit results
We issued unmodified audit opinions on all financial statements this year within the statutory deadline of 31 August 2017. We do this when the financial statements are prepared in accordance with the relevant legislative requirements and Australian accounting standards, and can be relied upon.
Water entities used good financial reporting practices to produce high quality financial statements in a timely manner for 2016–17. Entities with issues last year put appropriate processes in place and made information available by the agreed timeframes this year.
Seqwater met the statutory reporting deadline this year for the first time in three years, after the quality of the asset valuation process improved.
