Tx-Rails — Local Government Pricing Sheet
The auditable underlay for Local Government — every rate notice, every planning approval, every procurement award, every grant disbursement, every councillor conflict-of-interest declaration that the Auditor-General, the ombudsman, the integrity commission, the ratepayer, and the journalist all need to see the same. Cryptographic continuous audit + decision-provenance + multi-party attestation, sitting underneath your existing finance system, planning portal, procurement platform, asset register, HR system, and agenda-management software. We don’t replace any of them — we bind to them via a published integration mode and produce tamper-evident, jurisdiction-independent records of every decision council records. See local-government.md for the 30 federations covering council functions + integrity oversight.
What you get
Three integrated capabilities, one platform:
- Continuous cryptographic audit infrastructure
Every meeting agenda, every councillor-vote record, every conflict-of-interest declaration, every procurement-award decision, every planning-approval, every rate-notice issuance, every asset-condition assessment, every grant disbursement committed to a Byzantine-fault-tolerant ledger and Merkle-anchored to the Hedera public DLT. Continuous evidence stream is the structural answer to “the records were accidentally overwritten” — every integrity commission finding of the last decade depended on records that either didn’t exist or couldn’t be verified.
Aligned with: Local Government Act (state-by-state in AU + UK Local Government Acts); Public Records Act / State Records Acts; ICAC / IBAC / CCC / NACC investigation methodology; LGA standards inquiries; UK Audit Commission successor frameworks (Section 114 notices in England, Section 24 reports in Wales); Office of Local Government performance frameworks; AASB / IPSAS reporting standards for the public sector; ACNC / charity reporting where relevant. - Multi-party decision-attestation with smart-contract-equivalents
Councillor co-signature on conflict-of-interest declarations bound to the matter declared; multi-officer co-signature on procurement-award decisions over delegation thresholds; planning-approval signoffs co-signed by the relevant determining authority + report-author; rate-revaluation decisions co-signed by the valuer-general + council CFO; federal-grant acquittal evidence chain (from grant agreement → council resolution → procurement award → contract execution → asset capitalisation). - Auditor-General, ombudsman, integrity-commission & ratepayer-grade evidence pipeline
Live data access for the Auditor-General + integrity commission (ICAC / IBAC / CCC / NACC / LGSC); ombudsman evidence packs; Section-114 / Section-24 audit packs; ratepayer-facing transparency (cryptographically-verifiable “where did my rates go” reports); FOI-response evidence chains.
What we sell — and what we don’t
What we don’t sell at any price: full transaction-front-end replacement. We don’t build your finance system, your planning portal, your procurement platform, your customer-service tool, your community-engagement app, your kerbside-collection booking site. Your operational and citizen-facing screens stay put — they’re significant procurement investments and citizen-familiarity assets. If you need a new screen, your engineering team builds it against our published SDK with our reference connectors.
What we do sell falls into two groups:
A. Operator utilities (bundled — Items 2 + 4 in the pricing table)
- Evidence-retrieval portal — your governance team pulls cryptographic proofs in response to Auditor-General, integrity-commission, ombudsman, FOI, or media questions. Generates evidence packs in formats acceptable to the Auditor-General’s office, ICAC / IBAC / CCC / NACC investigators, parliamentary inquiries, and Section-114 / Section-24 reviewers.
- Compliance + integrity dashboard — live view of conflict-of-interest declaration freshness, procurement-delegation-threshold compliance, planning-decision audit-trail completeness, grant-acquittal status by program, asset-revaluation evidence aging, councillor-vote-record integrity.
- Trust-management UI — operator-side controls for your enterprise PKI: certificate issuance for the GM/CEO, councillors, senior officers, statutory-officer roles (CFO, Engineer-of-Record, Building Surveyor), revocation, partner-org onboarding (state Office of Local Government, regional alliance partners, federal grant authorities), kill-switch.
B. Supplier / counterparty attestation UI (optional — Item 5 in the pricing table)
Thin signature surface for external counterparties — procurement-tender bidders, professional-service consultants, capital-works contractors, grant-acquittal reviewers, regional-alliance partner councils, state Office-of-Local-Government compliance officers. This is explicitly in scope for us to develop, distinct from the “no procurement-platform replacement” line above.
What it does:
– DID / certificate-based authentication
– Per-tenant queue of pending attestations (tender bid-acknowledgement co-signs, milestone-payment co-signs, grant-acquittal evidence signoffs, regional-alliance shared-service attestations, contractor-of-record compliance declarations)
– Sign + submit with cryptographic proof landing in the BFT mesh
– Multi-tenant via entnum — each counterparty sees only their own queue
What it explicitly is NOT:
– A procurement / sourcing / RFQ platform replacement
– A contractor-management or contract-management replacement
– A grant-administration workflow tool
When you’d buy this: large-value capital works programs where multi-party co-signature on milestone evidence is currently PDF/email; federal-grant programs (Roads to Recovery, Building Better Regions, Levelling Up Fund equivalents) where the grant issuer increasingly demands real-time verifiable acquittal evidence; regional-alliance arrangements (NSW Joint Organisations, UK Combined Authorities) where shared-service evidence must be ring-fenced.
Pricing — five line items, four budget homes (Item 5 optional)
| # | Item | Type | Indicative price (AUD) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | One-off integration & onboarding — integration-mode selection, wiring against your finance / planning / procurement / asset / HR / agenda-management systems, certificate-authority setup, UAT, launch | One-off CapEx — capitalisable over 3–5 years | A$100,000 – A$220,000 |
| 2 | One-off operator-UI configuration — evidence-retrieval portal skinned to your council’s brand; regulator-export templates (Auditor-General audit-packs, Office-of-Local-Government performance packs, ICAC / IBAC evidence packs, FOI-response packs, grant-acquittal packs); integrity dashboard customised; SSO with your IdP | One-off CapEx — capitalisable over 3–5 years | A$50,000 – A$110,000 |
| 3 | Annual support & maintenance (security patches, OS/library upgrades, business-hours help desk with after-hours escalation for council-meeting nights, 99.5% uptime SLA, integration-mode adjustments, operator-UI updates for new regulator templates as they’re published) | OpEx — renewable annually | A$70,000 / year |
| 4 | Tx-Rails platform access — BFT infrastructure, audit attestation, Hedera anchoring, dual-DC redundancy (Sydney + Melbourne by default for AU councils; London + Manchester for UK), Auditor-General + integrity-commission pipeline. Includes the three operator utilities. Tiered by council size — see range governance below. | OpEx — annual platform subscription, council-tiered | A$30,000 – A$250,000 / year |
| 5 | Supplier / counterparty attestation UI (optional) — thin signature surface for tender bidders, capital-works contractors, grant-acquittal reviewers, regional-alliance partners. NOT a procurement-platform replacement. | One-off CapEx — capitalisable over 3–5 years | A$60,000 – A$160,000 |
| Year 1 total (Tier-3 example: Tier-3 metropolitan council, Items 1+2 mid-points, Item 5 excluded) | A$405,000 | ||
| Year 1 total with Item 5 mid-point | A$515,000 | ||
| Year 2+ ongoing (Tier-3 example) | A$200,000 / year |
Item 4 — council-tier pricing:
Local government’s pricing is council-size-tiered rather than pyramid-count tiered, because most councils need 1–3 federations (typically meetings-decisions, procurement-and-grants, planning-and-development) and the differentiation comes from staffing + budget scale rather than pyramid count.
| Tier | Council profile | Annual platform fee (Item 4) |
|---|---|---|
| Tier 4 | Small rural / regional council (<10k ratepayers, <A$40M budget) — Shape 3 single pyramid | A$30,000 |
| Tier 3 | Mid-tier regional or outer-metro council (10k–50k ratepayers, A$40M–A$150M budget) — 1–2 pyramids | A$80,000 |
| Tier 2 | Tier-1 metropolitan council or large regional council (50k–250k ratepayers, A$150M–A$600M budget) — 2–3 pyramids (Shape 1 sovereign for high-integrity-exposure councils) | A$150,000 |
| Tier 1 | Capital-city council, joint-organisation umbrella, state Office of Local Government acting as multi-council operator — Shape 2 grouped covering 5–10+ councils | A$250,000+ |
The Tier-4 floor (A$30k) is deliberately low to keep the platform accessible to small rural councils that are most under-resourced for integrity-infrastructure — and most vulnerable when an integrity-inquiry lands. State Office-of-Local-Government cross-subsidy (Shape 3 multi-tenant) makes the Tier-4 number even more achievable if a state regulator becomes the umbrella operator.
Item 1 — what governs the range:
– A$100k floor — hash-only attestation (Mode A): your existing systems commit as normal; we receive only content hashes. Lowest integration cost; suits small councils with limited IT muscle.
– A$220k ceiling — atomic dual-write (Mode B): finance/procurement and Tx-Rails commit in the same transaction. Highest integrity guarantee; suits councils with recent integrity-inquiry exposure.
– Most councils land mid-range with change-data-capture observation (Mode C) at ~A$140–180k.
Item 5 — what governs the range:
– A$60k floor — single-flow attestation kiosk (e.g. just tender-bid acknowledgement co-sign), single supplier role.
– A$160k ceiling — multi-flow hub (tender bid + milestone payment + grant acquittal + regional-alliance shared-service attestation), multiple supplier role tiers, DID auth, deep brand alignment.
Payback and ROI
For a Tier-3 mid-tier regional or outer-metro council with ~A$120M annual budget and ~A$50M in directly counterparty-touching flow (procurement, contractor payments, grant acquittals).
| Annual benefit | Conservative | Realistic |
|---|---|---|
| Audit IT-controls displacement (external auditor + Auditor-General performance-audit work reduction) | A$50,000 | A$150,000 |
| Procurement-reconciliation & dispute overhead reduction (delegated-purchasing audit-prep, tender-process integrity evidence, contractor-payment-dispute reduction) | A$100,000 | A$300,000 |
| Reduced exposure to integrity-inquiry cost (an ICAC / IBAC / CCC inquiry into a single procurement matter costs the council A$2M–A$20M+ in legal fees + restructuring; even partial avoidance is highly valuable) | A$200,000 | A$2,000,000 |
| Reduced exposure to Auditor-General qualified-audit-opinion outcomes (qualified opinions trigger management restructures, councillor-vote-of-no-confidence cycles, and significant remediation programs) | A$50,000 | A$300,000 |
| Federal + state grant compliance evidence (faster acquittals → improved future-grant standing; Roads to Recovery / Building Better Regions / federal-program acquittal-overhead reduction) | A$50,000 | A$200,000 |
| Reduced FOI response cost + reputational protection (FOI requests increasingly demand evidence chains; structurally-verifiable records cut response time + improve relationship with local media) | A$50,000 | A$200,000 |
| Total annual value delivered | A$500,000 | A$3,150,000 |
| Tx-Rails Year 2+ cost (Tier-3 example) | A$200,000 | A$200,000 |
| Net annual return | A$300,000 | A$2,950,000 |
| ROI multiple | 2.5× | 15.8× |
The 15.8× realistic multiple is heavily driven by the integrity-inquiry-cost-avoidance line. Most councils that get touched by ICAC / IBAC / CCC / NACC incur A$2M+ in defence + restructuring costs over multi-year inquiry cycles; structurally-verifiable records make the inquiry materially shorter or less invasive. For a council that’s been touched by an inquiry in the last 5 years, the realistic-end ROI is dramatically higher; for a council that hasn’t and statistically won’t be, the conservative end (A$300k net) is the realistic-end number.
Pilot terms — non-binding, parallel-run, zero operational risk
- 3 months running Tx-Rails alongside your existing systems. No production switchover.
- Mode A (hash-only) integration with one chosen federation (typically
tx-rails-localgov-meetings-decisions,tx-rails-localgov-procurement-grants, ortx-rails-localgov-planning-development) for the pilot. - Walk-away clause: if at month 3 the metrics don’t meet agreed targets, the engagement ends.
- Auditor-General / integrity-commission pre-validation: before signing, we’ll meet with your external auditor + state Office of Local Government to confirm evidence-pack acceptability.
- Data ownership: cryptographic exports are open-format, re-readable indefinitely — survives councillor-term changes, CEO departures, and council amalgamations.
Why now
- NACC (National Anti-Corruption Commission) operational since July 2023; ICAC / IBAC / CCC tightening; integrity-inquiry threshold lowering.
- Section 114 + Section 24 notices in UK local government (Birmingham, Croydon, Thurrock, Slough, Woking) demonstrating real consequence for record-keeping failures.
- Office of Local Government performance frameworks tightening — performance-audit cycles becoming more evidence-intensive.
- Federal grant programs (Roads to Recovery, Building Better Regions, Levelling Up, Towns Fund) demanding faster, more verifiable acquittal evidence.
- ICAC / IBAC / CCC procurement-investigation pipeline — high-profile cases continuing to drive integrity-infrastructure investment at council level.
- Local-government cyber + ransomware exposure continuing to grow — independent cryptographic evidence becomes the structural answer to “did the council pay the ransom” questions.
Next steps
- 30-minute discovery call with your CEO + Director of Corporate Services + General Counsel / governance lead.
- Letter of Intent — non-binding, signals pilot interest.
- Pilot kick-off within 8 weeks of LOI.
Contact: John Olsen · john@itotchaincloud.com.au · +61 490 114 879
Reference data sources: ABS Government Finance Statistics (Cat. 5512.0); Australian Local Government Association financial reports; NSW + VIC + QLD Auditor-General performance-audit reports on local government; ICAC / IBAC / CCC published reports + cost-of-inquiry case studies; UK National Audit Office local-government value-for-money reports; LGA + DLUHC research on integrity-inquiry costs to councils; published ICAC / IBAC reports on council-procurement matters (Hurstville, Auburn, Casey, Glen Eira, Croydon, Thurrock, Slough as exemplars). Full citations available on request.
Tx-Rails — Built by IT/OT Chain & Cloud Australia (ITOTCCA). Sydney · London.