An evaluation of the government's Going Home Staying Home reforms by KPMG found the program divided homelessness services into "winners and losers".

Under the shake-up, homelessness services were required to enter into a competitive tender process to win funding.

"The decision to open up funding for homelessness services to a competitive bidding process ultimately drove an outcome where there were clear winners and losers," the report found. "This is the aspect of reform that has attracted the most criticism."

It also described the tender process, announced over the summer of 2013/14, as "compressed" with many in the sector describing the proposed timeframes as "unrealistic".

"Putting the tender out over the Christmas period would generally not be ideal, and the delays in announcing the tender outcomes caused considerable uncertainty and anxiety for service providers," the report found.

"The delays also placed pressure on Family and Community Services staff to 'push ahead' which contributed to some mistakes being made."

The rush to meet the tender deadline distracted refuge operators from supporting their clients, the report found.

"Stakeholders also reported negative impacts on clients, including that clients were discouraged from seeking much-needed help and/or that the level of service that could be provided to clients was reduced," it said.

The tender process coincided with a staff freeze at the FaCS which resulted in a heavy reliance of short-term contractors and a high degree of staff turnover during the implementation.

"It meant more change for staff and the sector and created an unstable local environment in which to introduce Going Home Staying Home," the report said.

KPMG's research involved surveying FaCS staff and providers of homelessness services, noting criticism of transparency around the changes.

"A key criticism from external stakeholders about the procurement process was the lack of transparency of how the funding outcomes came about," it found.

"This has led some stakeholders to conclude that outcomes, such as any loss of smaller services from the system that may have occurred, were preordained, and unfair – more than 60 per cent of survey respondents thought that the outcomes for small and medium-sized services were not very fair or not fair at all, and 50 per cent considered this to be the case for women's services in particular."

The report found a campaign by women's refuges to protest the new funding arrangement contained misinformation, noting that the total number total number of services for women and their children increased.

Greens MP and spokesperson for the status of women, Mehreen Faruqi said the report did not give an accurate picture of the reform's impact on women's refuges.

"This report is essentially a review of the tendering process, which is worth next to nothing to the many women leaving domestic violence situations who have been left without support," she said.

"What the report does show is that the whole process was rushed and non-transparent and added unrealistic workloads to service providers to complete tenders in tight timeframes over the Christmas period. Within FaCS itself there was a staffing freeze and an over-reliance on consultants.

"But the problems in FaCS dwarf the problems we have heard on the ground from Bega to Ballina about loss of funding and staff and the risks this is creating for victims of domestic violence."

A FaCS spokesman said the review was part of a broader strategy designed to improve homelessness services.

"There were shortcomings in the way the reforms were handled and that we must do better to manage these reforms and our relationship with those who deliver services on the ground," he said.

"Other shortcomings included that the time for service planning and tendering was insufficient given the scale of change and the sector's unfamiliarity with competitive tendering."