"Paladin forced to pay back $5.7m for failures in offshore detention services", 18 September 2019

The offshore detention security contractor Paladin has had to pay back $5.7m to the Australian government for thousands of breaches of its key performance indicators.

Documents produced to the Senate...that from May 2018 to April 2019 the contractor was forced to credit back $3.1m of its $423m contract value and faced an adverse assessment for a further $8.1m for the month of July 2018.

...In that month the department assessed that Paladin would have owed $5.6m for 928 failures relating to timely delivery of transport services, $1.4m for 592 breaches of entry and egress processes and $973,500 relating to 649 breaches of training and qualifications requirements.

...In the documents Paladin explained the failures by describing its “inability to deploy expat personnel”, but the department found this was no excuse for failure to deliver training to staff and “should not prevent … incident reporting, particularly as incident reporting is generally overseen in Australia”.

...Labor’s home affairs spokeswoman, Kristina Keneally, noted that Paladin had recorded more than 1,000 performance failures in an 18-month period, almost two a day, including “such poor maintenance that a Home Affairs official actually fell through rotting floorboards during a prearranged inspection”.