Yet another huge procurement bungle has been unearthed. Guess where?

The hits keep coming for Defence. The Australian National Audit Office has just revealed another big bungled project by the department, one that was a decade in the making.

While it lacks the champagne glamour of the Defence-Thales munitions scandal and only costs hundreds of millions, not billions, the debacle over “myClearance” demonstrates that Defence’s inability to manage procurement — a core task for such an institution — is department-wide.

It’s also a likely unique case of procurement process so bad that the company that benefited objected to it.

“myClearance” might sound like a colonoscopy prep, but it is in fact the notional answer to longstanding problems with the systems used by the Australian Government Security Vetting Agency within Defence to vet people for security clearances across the public sector — a process much criticised by other agencies for its glacial speed.

In 2014, Defence decided that its vetting platform needed to be replaced, and thus began what became the Vetting Transformation Project — given impetus, no doubt, by the Abbott government’s hysteria over the Snowden revelations and the idea of “inside threats” used to...