As far as possible, Departments and agencies should avoid defining outcomes in subjective or value laden terms. Using such terms increases the risk that the appropriation will be found to be invalid, or that particular expenditures will be challenged as being outside the appropriation Agencies also need to obtain legal advice on the specific wording if their outcomes change. In attempting to encompass the full range of an agency's activities within a given outcome, some outcome statements can be over specified, with various qualifications and extensions of the core issue or objective. This is a problem expressly referred to in the Senate Finance and Public Administration Committee's Report on the format of Portfolio Budget Statements. Greater attention to some of the desired characteristics described can help avoid this problem.
Some portfolios have one or more outcomes covering all the agencies within the portfolio.
Portfolio-wide outcomes are reasonable where there is sufficient uniformity of purpose across the portfolio. It seems unlikely, however that the relatively high aggregation of functions within Commonwealth portfolios would comfortably allow a single outcome of sufficient specificity to cover all the functions and responsibilities of all the agencies in any given portfolio. Where portfolio-wide outcomes have been used, some agencies support these with a series of intermediate outcomes that relate more closely to the work of the agency. Some agencies' outcomes are quite similar. Such developments would be subject to specific tests of the costs and benefits of such a move, especially counterbalancing short-term transition costs with potential long term efficiencies.