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February 7th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda An audit of the scheme which reports the carbon emissions of Australia’s biggest polluters has found it contains “significant security vulnerabilities” and too much duplication across jurisdictions.
The National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting Scheme (NGERS) was established in 2007 and currently reports emissions and energy use data for some 775 corporations.
But from April the scheme will be used to determine which facilities will be slugged with Labor’s carbon tax because they produce more than 25,000 tonnes of CO2 annually.
A national audit office (ANAO) report, released on Tuesday, has found that the NGERS is a “workable” greenhouse gas and energy reporting scheme that is more accurate than previous voluntary industry surveys.
However, the audit report states there’s still a lot of room for improvement.
In particular, the ANAO argues the scheme relies on an online reporting system know as OSCAR which contains “significant security vulnerabilities … that increased the risk of an unauthorised person gaining access to, and threatening the integrity of, NGERS data”.
Almost half of the corporations surveyed by the ANAO rated the system as average with just 32 per cent labelling OSCAR good to very good. Some 20 per cent found the IT system poor or very poor.
“The absence of an upload facility, the level of duplication of data requirements across programs, the potential for errors in manual data entry and slowness of the system are all problems that have constrained the effectiveness of OSCAR,” the audit report states.
But there’s good news on the horizon.
The federal climate change department says an interim upgrade is due soon with an entirely new reporting system to follow in the longer-term for the carbon pricing mechanism.
“The department has made significant improvements to the security of the IT system,” it said in response to the audit report’s findings.
The department also plans to increase its verification of corporation’s self-assessed and reported greenhouse gas emissions and energy data.
In 2009/10, nearly three-quarters of submitted reports contained errors, with 17 per cent containing “significant errors”, the audit found.
The ANAO also states that while federal, state and territory governments have been working to streamline emissions reporting across jurisdictions since 2009 progress has been slow at the state level.
“There has been limited progress across other (non-national) jurisdictions to reduce the multiple reporting requirements for corporations.
“Ongoing tensions exist in relation to data sharing arrangements.”
Finally, the ANAO found that compliance costs for the NGERS are “higher than the costs reported under similar international schemes”.
Capital costs for corporations to submit reports range from $5000 to $3 million with recurrent costs ranging from $1500 to $1.5 million. The original cost estimate was $10,000 annually.
Labor’s controversial carbon tax starts in July with a fixed emissions price of $23 a tonne.
It will transition to an emissions trading scheme in mid-2015.
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