BASS is an annual benchmarking of administrative and support (A&S) functions for a number of government agencies (26 in 2013/14).
BASS results, when used in conjunction with other performance data and agencies' strategic planning, help to provide performance insights through showing how agencies' back office functions are performing over time (agencies now have five years of data to track their individual progress, relative to other agencies and international benchmarks).
Participating agencies are grouped into cohorts for comparison based on size. The Treasury is part of the small agency cohort.
The Treasury's A&S spend for 2013/14 was 8.15% of total expenditure; the median for the small agency cohort, and below the overall median of 12.77%.
The Treasury's administrative & support (A&S) services have increased in nominal terms by $1.564 million. The increase is mainly attributable to increased ICT capital expenditure as infrastructure, was upgraded leading to improvements in effectiveness.
The most significant initiative implemented to improve the delivery of A&S services was in March 2012 when the corporate service functions (Finance, Information Technology [IT], Information Management [IM] and HR) of the Central Agencies were integrated into the Central Agencies Shared Services unit (CASS) located in the Treasury. This has enabled efficiencies to occur in the costs of Finance, IM and HR. As expected, the BASS results show that the Treasury's share of operating A&S costs have continued to reduce over time as the CASS initiative progresses. Work continues in CASS to standardise the way of working across all three central agencies and implementing common processes designed to yield improved practices and delivery of corporate support.