It feels like a bit of an “emperor has no clothes” situation: All these people in all these departments don't understand the rules, yet no one wants to say anything because they might appear like they're not good at their jobs. How can that be allowed to be the culture until there's this massive government-wide investigation of procurement that finds all of these systemic problems?
Your departments have internal audit processes. Ms. Ostridge said that lack of documentation is actually a common audit finding. One of the reasons for a lack of documentation is “I didn't know I was supposed to document anything” or “I don't actually know the rules around documentation.”
How did this not percolate from the ground up to someone who's accountable and says, “Guess what. We have a major procurement problem. Nobody understands these rules and someone's going to find out eventually that we're not wearing any clothes.” Did that not happen?