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Connected Government, Local Government

Western Australia Terminates Shared Corporate Services

By Rahul Joshi | 11 July 2011

The Office of Shared Services (OSS) programme that began operations six years ago to consolidate and standardise services for the public sector is to be dismantled, as it has cost taxpayers A$444 milllion (US$474 million) but only managed to include 20 per cent of government employees in its services by 2011.

In an extraordinary statement, the Western Australian Premier Colin Barnett informed the press that the OSS was “probably one of the great bungles of public administration in Western Australia.”

“This has been a very expensive and largely failed program,” he said.

Findings by the Economic Regulation Authority (ERA) suggested that the OSS was not serving its purpose, and had cost the government far more than it had saved. The savings, at A$40 million (US$42.8 milion), were A$20 million (US$21.4 million) less than anticipated.

Individual governmental agencies will go back to having a decentralised corporate services structure.

According to the OSS website, the programme was set up in response to findings in 2002 from an internal functional review. It was set up because the “model allows the Whole-of-Government to leverage economies of scale through shared resources, technology, information and processes.”

It was planned to handle financial services, human resource services, and miscellaneous administrative online services for the Western Australian public sector.

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