Anti-corruption body wastes time with a triviality
But do not get excited – it is pretty low-level stuff: a senior public servant (their name has been concealed) inappropriately placed her sister's fiance into a job. This is pretty ordinary work, and not an especially spectacular start for Australia's premier anti-corruption body. It is the kind of matter commonly dealt with by the Australian Public Service Commission, not an anti-corruption body. It really looks well beneath the role of the NACC.
There is real work to be done, but the NACC is distracted by dealing with comparative trivialities.
The first two years of the NACC have been a real disappointment. There is negative feel to it, as though the NACC's leadership team are unwilling to flex their muscles. Even the decision to conceal the names of those involved in this incident is puzzling – they did wrong, so why not expose them? The NACC emphasised that it regarded the matter as serious and pointed out that the principal miscreant was in a senior position. The evidence collected showed the breach was deliberate and flagrant. It was a misuse of public power, a misallocation of public money, and it meant that a person who deserved to get the job missed out. Yet the NACC seems to be more concerned to protect the wrongdoers than to expose the wrongdoing.
This is a dispiriting position to be adopted by the agency charged with overseeing transparency and accountability in the public sector. The public is denied transparency; those breaking the rules escape accountability.
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We should not be surprised. Everything we have seen so far from the NACC suggests it is not up to the task of tackling serious corruption.
The NACC's decision not even to open an investigation into the six persons referred to it by the Robo-debt royal commission was an early sign that something was not right. That decision, which was an awful error, needed to be corrected by Gail Furness SC, the statutory inspector of the NACC. Ms Furness' report exposed that the NACC commissioner himself was unable to manage a basic conflict of interest – yet he is the person to whom public officials should turn to get guidance on their conflicts of interest.
That misjudgment by the NACC commissioner led to a finding of 'officer misconduct' on his part – so, ironically, the first finding of misconduct about the NACC was a finding against the NACC.
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ABC News
29-07-2025
- ABC News
The tax office traded people for programs and is still grappling with the consequences
A decade ago the Australian Tax Office (ATO) management faced a tough choice. Confronting government demands to cut costs, they made a simple trade-off: people for programs. The ATO would slash staff numbers and instead rely on automated systems and slick computer algorithms to process returns and pick up tax fraud. The cost of that decision is only now being revealed, in half a dozen scathing reports by the auditor-general, the inspector-general of taxation, the Australian Public Service Commission (APSC) and others which provide a sweeping account of how the ATO is failing. The ATO has long been one of the most opaque agencies in the government. Its critics accuse it of a lack of accountability, and using taxpayer secrecy as an invisibility cloak to prevent scrutiny of its shortcomings. The external reports by the auditor general and others provide glimpses behind that cloak that can be used to build a picture of the ATO's troubled inner workings. That picture shows a tax system teetering on the edge, and an agency culture that ignores red flags. The saga began back in 2013, when prime minister Tony Abbott's incoming government was demanding an efficiency dividend. By this it meant the government should pay less money to run the ATO, even as the amounts raised by the office were soaring. Under Commissioner Chris Jordan, the ATO's response was to cut staff and throw resources into new technology that could do the work to process returns, to run the checks and detect fraud. Jordan, who stepped down from the ATO last year, spoke of modernising how the office works "as part of the digital revolution to make 'tax just happen'." Which is to say, tax collection without human intervention. The ATO isn't alone in this dilemma. Adapting to new technology is a universal challenge that tax agencies around the world are struggling with. But the ATO's trade-off has had serious consequences. Between 2013 and 2019, the ATO shed close to 6000 people — almost a quarter of its staff. Some of the hardest hit were those sections that detect fraud and chase up debt. The cuts were already beginning when Jordan became commissioner in January 2013, the first outsider in the top job in the agency's history. From 2011 to 2019, the indirect tax division, which collects GST and Customs excise, lost half its staff — more than 1000 tax officers gone. At the same time Jordan was bringing in more outsiders — partners from his old firm KPMG and top tier law firms, who typically would parachute in as deputy legal counsel and speedily be appointed deputy commissioners or higher. By 2021 the top four executives at the ATO all came from outside, though the incoming commissioner, Ron Heferen, has reversed that. In the new look ATO, law degrees were a minimal requirement for advancement, preferably with a history of working outside the office. 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AU Financial Review
29-07-2025
- AU Financial Review
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ABC News
28-07-2025
- ABC News
Western Sydney Airport official who sought $200k kickback narrowly avoids jail time
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