CHAPTER 4looking at the agencies

Introduction

During 2004–05, the majority of complaints received by the Ombudsman (78%) concerned the five Australian Government departments and agencies listed below. This chapter focuses on particular issues that arose during the year in investigating complaints about these agencies:

• Centrelink—7,699 complaints
  
  
• Child Support Agency—2,094 complaints
  
  
• Australian Taxation Office—1,633 complaints
  
  
• Australia Post—1,190 complaints
  
  
• Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs—873 complaints.

As well, this chapter looks at three other special areas of complaint work:

• complaints about the Australian Defence Force, handled by the Ombudsman discharging the role of Defence Force Ombudsman
  
  
• complaints about the Australian Federal Police, handled under the Complaints (Australian Federal Police) Act 1981
  
  
• complaints about the handling by agencies of freedom of information requests.

The 'Other agencies' section of this chapter provides examples of complaints received about some other agencies, such as the Department of Family and Community Services and the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations.

While the discussion and analysis of complaints arising in specific areas of government illustrates the role of the Ombudsman, it does not fully portray the work of the office. The issues raised in complaints to the Ombudsman are mostly about difficulties that arise between people and government generally, rather than about specific problem areas. Examples of difficulties that commonly arise are delay in decision making, inadequate explanation of decisions, and deficient record keeping. Some of these general themes are taken up in other chapters of this report (such as 'How the Ombudsman helped people' and 'Problem areas in government decision making').

'... analysis of complaints arising ... does not fully portray the work of the office.'

Something should also be said of the agencies about which most complaints are received. A common feature is that each of those agencies engages daily in a high number of direct transactions with members of the public, on matters such as providing benefits, assessing taxation, granting visas, calculating child support liability, and providing postal services. The complaints received by the Ombudsman are a small fraction of the total number of transactions undertaken by the agencies.

Complaints sometimes arise from the service provided by any agency, but at other times complaints are more about a perceived difficulty in the law being administered by an agency. The complaints to the Ombudsman illustrate the difficulties that people face in dealing with government, but not necessarily the standard of administration in those agencies. This point is captured in another way in the 'Performance report' chapter, which gives more emphasis to the remedies and assistance that the Ombudsman's office can provide to the public than to whether in the Ombudsman's view there was an agency defect.

Figure 4.1 shows the proportion of complaints received by the Ombudsman from agencies about which most complaints are received.

A detailed breakdown of complaints by portfolio and agency is in the 'Statistics' appendix.