Amid transparency hurdles, big tech contract blow-outs, accountability misses – Accenture gets further $332 million pay-day on aged care’s tab

Outsourced to international tech firms like Accenture, Salesforce and Capgemini, the government painted tech contracts as the silver bullet to solve all of aged care digital and efficiency woes. The upgrades, part of a 1.4 billion dollar tax-payer effort to make robust the digital systems long criticised, have been part and parcel with the push of the new act and it’s rules. However, as the Federal government extended Accenture’s contract by $332 million in December, leaders, advocates and senators have questioned the efficacy of the government’s spending and the need for greater transparency.

Quietly extended

Ever so quietly done, the Federal government extended international tech firm Accenture’s contract by $332 million in late December. Accenture is set to have a pay-day of over half a million tax-payer dollars per day for another 730 days, that is, two years. Couched within the push to modernise Australia’s aged care digital resources, the contract showcases that Accenture will be supplying IT contractors towards the Federal government’s aged care tech overhaul.

Topping up

As aged care leaders question the lack of funding for supplementary beds, low-interest loans nationally to help supercharge the building of new beds, and the need to support holistic care outside of care minutes, the galling sense that tax-payer money is not being spent well or transparently is growing.

Accenture’s contracts, and cost-blowouts have now become a sore point in Canberra, with experts now no longer wondering whether there will be another “tech wreck” but when it will land.

Barely a year ago, Accenture inked a $258.5 million deal to cater to Canberra’s push for aged care innovation and yet around 12 months later, that money seems not to have been enough, with the additional $322 million top up.

Experts say that at $580,000 every working day, now over the course of four years, it is decidedly Accenture’s biggest active federal contract, and in terms of value, the most prolific under the 1.4 billion dollar tax-payer funded budget. There is growing discontent as to whether these contracts are efficiently and economically working towards the promise of aged care’s digital metamorphosis.

Precedence

Within the precedence of past failings, experts are flabbergasted at the prolific contract extension that Accenture has received. The firm has been central to multiple high profile failures in Canberra’s push to modernise digital processes across multiple portfolios.

One of the most notable ‘tech wrecks’ of late being the Permissions Capability platform for the Department of Home Affairs, abandoned after nearly two years of effort and $16 million in public money. This most recent failure is another in a series of failures to bring digital efficacy to modern visa processing, with an overall failure-tag of more than $100 million. The government did front the reason for the shelving of the project, Accenture’s inability to provide a functional prototype on time. This led to the Home Affairs office scrapping the whole initiative.

Further problems plagued Accenture’s handling, after being awarded a contract by Canberra, of the myClearance initiative, $307 million wasn’t enough to provide solutions, and even with a $130 million extension, the government’s security vetting system upgrade was still plagued by complications.

Experts are clear, there has been considerable precedence that calls on greater care when handing out contracts and particularly there is a monumental need for greater oversight during a project’s run. They point to these clear and costly failures as a broader pattern for Canberra’s portfolio upgrades, along with eye-watering tax-payer funds wasted and not used for desperate injection elsewhere, such as aged care bed builds. Many are now saying that not only were the red-flag billowing in the wind, it may have taken particularly ‘head-in-sand’ methods to believe entrusting Accenture with further aged care upgrades would have yielded any different results.

Blocked transparency

As the new $322 million extension for Accenture to work on aged care upgrades gets underway, the concern about transparency of government spending, and project management of these contracts has grown.

October last year saw Senator Payman secure a Senate order, requiring Minister Rae and his team to produce extensive documents by 21 November 2025, so as to begin reviewing aged care’s digital cost blowout. Four months ago, the Senator articulated that long-gone was the need for accountability with the gargantuan tech contracts that had been given out, without appropriate transparency of how, and to what extent, these contracts have been assessed to be awarded, run and continued.

She asked for documentation to allow for this appropriate examination, for value for money assessments, uptake evaluations, whole of life cost reports, tender analyses, comparative pricing from competitors to the tech giants, licensing agreements, internal communications on procurement compliance and independent audit findings.

Aged Care Minister Sam Rae rebuffed the order as unreasonable, stating that it would take too much government time to service the order. In lieu of complying with the government order, Minister Rae countered with a private briefing to Senator Payment, and pledged publicly available documents. Conveyed through formal channels of government correspondence, this decision has been decried as a move to conceal critical records that could bolster the transparency and accountability these gargantuan contracts require.

As providers continue to lambast the business to government (B2G) portal and the industry at large reels from the “maze-like” conditions of My Aged Care, experts, advocates and aged care leaders continue to call on Canberra to pivot towards transparency and accountability in a sector that has considerable need, and where no dollar must or should be wasted.