UPDATED: Former Regional Development Minister Jaala Pulford has defended the administration of its $1.7 billion regional development grants program which has come under fire in an Auditor General's report released this week.
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Auditor-General Andrew Greaves on Thursday released a scathing report on the running of Regional Development Victoria, attacking a lack of transparency, poor data, incomplete lists of grants awarded and overstated impact on jobs.
"Having administered more than $1 billion in allocated funds since 2011, RDV still cannot reliably determine whether their grants have improved economic or social outcomes directly or indirectly, or whether any benefits have been sustained beyond the immediate injection of funds into a community," the report reads.
Regional Development Victoria was first told after a 2015 audit to improve its practices.
The report said Ballarat and Geelong were among the leading beneficiaries of the program with 29.7 per cent of the total funds distributed from the program to December 31, 2018 going to those two local government regions.
In providing this, the report found RDV's distribution "uneven" on a per person basis with most of the 48 eligible local government areas receiving one grant.
However, Ms Pulford said the Government worked to make good on all of its election promises.
She said taken in isolation, the report did appear to show more heading towards Ballarat and Geelong, but added you only had to look at previous funding cycles to find other regions that had previously been beneficiaries
Ms Pulford added that a number of projects including in the fund were funded through multiple LGA's, but the reporting showed they were delivered to specific shire's, which was where the project would be based.
She added the Regional Development Fund was only one source of funding, with others such as the Agriculture Fund seeing less funding coming to populated areas as opposed to rural shires.
The report noted some improvements were made, but there was still a long way to go and there is a "high risk" that the next audit in 2021 will find a similar result.
It made seven recommendations, including keeping a complete list of all awarded grants and using social and economic data to understand areas of greatest need.
The Department of Jobs, Precincts and Regions which oversees Regional Development Victoria accepted the recommendations and has undertaken to implement them by December 31.
