The Australian government’s refusal to fully comply with a Senate order for documents on the 800 million dollar aged care technology upgrades has ignited fierce debate over transparency in public procurement.
Outsourced to international firms like Accenture, Salesforce and Capgemini, these upgrades are part of a 1.4 billion dollar effort to bolster digital systems under new aged care laws. By withholding key details under the guise of administrative burden, the government is accused of shielding potential inefficiencies and overspending from scrutiny, prompting questions about whether true accountability is possible when resource constraints can be cited as an excuse to evade disclosure.
At the heart of the initiative are the Government Provider Management System (GPMS) and the business to government (B2G) portal, both heavily dependent on Salesforce software. Accenture and Capgemini have spearheaded the GPMS, which handles new reporting obligations, while the B2G facilitates connections between provider systems and government platforms.
However, the project has been plagued by issues from inception, with costs escalating and timelines slipping. By July, deadlines for care and reporting reforms had been missed and foreign tech providers had nearly depleted the budget.
This has amplified concerns over value for money, especially given the 700 million dollars in contracts for what Senator Fatima Payman described as essentially configuring a Salesforce instance.
Accenture’s Track Record of Failures in Government Projects
The decision to rely on Accenture has drawn particular criticism, given the firm’s involvement in multiple high profile failures in Australian government technology ventures, often referred to as Canberra tech wrecks.
One notable example is the Permissions Capability platform for the Department of Home Affairs, which was abandoned after two years and 16 million dollars in expenditure, marking the third unsuccessful attempt to modernise visa processing with more than 100 million dollars wasted overall.
Accenture’s failure to deliver a functional prototype on schedule led Home Affairs to scrap the project entirely.
Further scrutiny falls on Accenture’s role in the government’s security vetting system, known as myClearance. Despite a 307 million dollar investment, the system encountered severe rollout problems, forcing manual workarounds and failing to meet performance targets after seven years of development.
Ongoing issues persisted, with a 130 million dollar extension still plagued by complications.
These setbacks are part of a broader pattern at Home Affairs, where more than 500 million dollars has been spent on failed ICT outsourcing projects, including disastrous visa tech upgrades.
Such history raises alarms about entrusting Accenture with the aged care upgrades, potentially repeating costly errors at taxpayers’ expense.
Echoes of Controversy: The NDIA Salesforce Project
Similar red flags appear in the National Disability Insurance Agency’s 180 million dollar Salesforce project, which Senator Payman is also targeting for greater disclosure. This initiative, centred on the PACE customer relationship management system, has seen contracts exceed 170 million dollars amid an ongoing probe into procurement irregularities that has lasted more than two years.
A parliamentary committee has called for a broad investigation into tech companies’ use of gifts and hospitality to secure deals, following revelations that Salesforce provided NDIA officials with undeclared benefits worth more than 100 dollars on at least 45 occasions between 2019 and 2023.
The project has faced accusations of falling short of Commonwealth procurement rules, with one contract ballooning from an initial 10 million dollar estimate to more than 200 million dollars.
Despite Salesforce defending the costs and value of its contributions, the NDIA’s failure to disclose these interactions has sparked outrage, with officials described as horrified by the lapses.
This parallel case underscores a systemic issue in government dealings with Salesforce, mirroring the aged care project’s reliance on the same vendor and fuelling demands for transparency.
The Senate Order and Push for Disclosure
In October, Senator Payman secured a Senate order requiring the production of extensive documents by 21 November 2025. This encompassed value for money assessments, uptake evaluations, whole of life cost reports, tender analyses, comparative pricing from competitors to Salesforce and MuleSoft, licensing agreements, internal communications on procurement compliance and independent audit findings.
The order also extended to the integration of My Health Record with My Aged Care. Payman has signalled plans for additional motions to pinpoint value for money documents and to interrogate officials during estimates hearings.
Aged Care Minister Sam Rae has rebuffed the order as unreasonable, claiming it would necessitate reviewing at least 130,000 pages and diverting thousands of hours from critical duties like implementing the Aged Care Act 2024 and Support at Home.
In lieu of full compliance, Rae offered a private briefing to Senator Payman and pledged to provide only publicly available documents by 27 November 2025. This response, conveyed through formal correspondence, has been lambasted for effectively concealing pivotal records such as evaluation reports and ministerial briefings.
Broader Implications for Transparency
This episode exposes vulnerabilities in Australia’s oversight mechanisms for major public investments. With the aged care sector serving some of the nation’s most vulnerable, the government’s tactics risk perpetuating inefficiencies and eroding confidence.
Crucially, it begs the question: how can there ever be any transparency if the government can withhold information using the excuse that it takes too long and uses too many resources to do so? As scrutiny intensifies on aged care and disability related projects, calls grow for reforms to ensure procurement processes prioritise accountability over convenience.
Aged care is a disgrace. Paying all that money to employ more , and they are hopeless! We have waited 3 months to transition my husband from respite to permanent. Each time you contact them, they tell you something different. Even tried to tell us we hadn’t applied for permanent last week. The stress this puts families through is enormous. I am disgusted!!!
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Wow! Sam Rae has succeeded in making “transparency” a very dirty word. If they had transparency none of you would retain their positions. But the remain hidden in clear sight. Shocking and sad!
So much for Albo and transparency
Yes PM having squandered your mandate by being bland instead of progressive
We see right through you,
Appalling waste of money and absolutely no regulation. How can contracts blow out that much and then how can they hide it. It is our money!
The “drunken sailors” are making decisions for our elderly and NDIS with no transparency what so ever as to where the Australian taxpayer’s money is going. Like everything Labour does the next party to get the top job will as usual, be stuck having to reign in the incredible spending spree this incompetent currupt government has put on all of us and our children for years to come. When your government is more interested in joining elites overseas and assisting them with Australian’s money it seems to me that someone needs to step in and call for a Royal commission on any government that has lost complete control of their idiologies and spending that would destroy the very fabric and sovereignty of a nation and it’s people. Their life long pensions should be axed when they deliberately lie and destroy their country and it’s freedoms!
I bet if all the perks, excessive salaries, inflated pensions and all the other goodies that go with it and there was a strict protocol for expenses etc. none of them would be employed as public servants. They probably would be unemployed because as sure as hell I would not employ them unless I wanted my business to go
bankrupt.
Reading this sends shivers up my spine. The SAH program falls into the same category. The roll out has been a debacle , causing untold stress and frustration to the vulnerable people it purports to be helping.
When anyone thinks that this Govt. and its disgraceful ministers etc. are this country’s salvation, and voting for them was the right thing to do, spend some time doing the research and see how appalling, dishonest, disgusting and beyond incompetent they are. Everything that is worthwhile for its citizens, health care, aged care, electricity, cost of living, NDIS, Home Care Packages, wind farms, destruction of farmer’s lands etc. are destroyed by those shameless bureaucrats who are completely devoid of any grey matter or respect for the truth.
Albanese will go down in history as the supreme destroyer of this country, its values and its standards. He will however, excel in wasting taxpayers money, abusing our trust, travelling the world with his girlfriend/partner at our expense whilst achieving nothing of any value. It is beyond belief that our standards have fallen so very low across the board and our citizens, particularly the vulnerable and elderly, who deserve care and respect, are treated like human detritus. Within the snake pit of the labour machine, transparency is an alien word, honesty is a fiction, competence is a foreign concept and citizens are just serfs who struggle and work hard just so the govt. can squeeze another dollar from them to maintain their limitless fountain of gold.
Rage is too gentle a word for how I feel about this gross mismanagement by Albanese and his repulsive crew and immense sadness is just the tip of my emotions for those who are so badly shortchanged when seeking the provision of appropriate and high quality aged care services.
Are we ‘throwing the baby out with the bathwater’ when we rush to replace people with machines when we race headlong into the Big Brother tunnel shoving social/aged/disability/medical CARE sectors into same stream as business/finance.
We are clearly seeing the incompatability in the single assessment for Aged Care reduced to allocating people to a level of funding or set of services based on a computer-generated formula decision v/s a human decision from a single (often remote) 1:1 interview. This is a complex unique human in a complex unique environment and things change. We don’t and can’t fit exactly into a specific set of holes. It is a disaster to remove human override or oversight completely. Most of the waste of money and failure is to jump from one extreme to the other in one step. SAH hasn’t trialled the basic structure first before throwing in the whole aged care population into a massive experiment
jaye johnson: You are correct. I always think that these people who make decisions are like kids in a toy shop – they jump on the bandwagon of what they think is the flavour of the month and do not do their due diligence, engage appropriate personnel who are specialists in the field and consider all variables. It is not their OWN money – it is the taxpayers money so if it turns out to be a monumental furphy with an astronomical cost attached , so what is it to them – it didn’t out of their own pockets so, disaster or not, it is business as usual. I just cannot believe that we pay these incompetents to make major decisions for us.
The Government has all the time necessary to hand over these documents to the Senate Committee looking at issues relating to Support At Home. Both Committees have long lead times to allow Hearings leading to reports next year.
It has been known for months there were systems development issues.
If these transgressions happened under the care of a company CEO, they would be in jail by now.