4. Management and accountability
Finance
PSR’s 2008–09 budget appropriation was $5.841 million. PSR also recovered an additional $0.497 million after being awarded legal costs following successful defence of Federal Court and High Court challenges.
During the year PSR built a comprehensive financial costing model that improved its ability to predict and manage the resources it needs to deal with its workload. This was timely as PSR received 136 cases during the year; this is a 172 per cent increase on 2007–08. While this workload put considerable pressure on PSR’s resources, the costing model was able to provide accurate data indicating that the bulk of the expenditure associated with these cases will be incurred in 2009–10 and 2010–11.
Although much of the expenditure associated with the 2008–09 workload will occur in future years, the size of this year’s caseload coming on top of gradual workload increases over recent years (see Table 1) put significant pressure on the current year’s budget and was a major focus for the PSR Management Team. PSR recorded a loss of $47,400 for 2008–09.
The Department of Finance and Deregulation has given approval for PSR to make a $1.5 million operating loss in 2009–10 to handle the increased workload. PSR will access reserves built up over previous years to fund this loss.
The Australian National Audit Office’s report on PSR’s 2008–09 financial statements was unqualified and was signed on 9 September 2009 (see Appendix 2).