CHAPTER 7Looking at the agencies

Introduction

The majority of approaches and complaints received about Australian Government agencies within the Ombudsman’s jurisdiction (77%) concerned the following six agencies:

• Australia Post
• Australian Taxation Office
• Centrelink
• Child Support Agency
• Department of Employment and Workplace Relations
• Department of Immigration and Citizenship.

This chapter focuses on particular issues that arose during 2006–07 in investigating complaints, and in dealing with the agencies more broadly. It also looks at other specialised areas of our work:

• dealing with complaints by current and former members of the Australian Defence Force (Defence Force Ombudsman)
• dealing with complaints about the Australian Federal Police, including under the role of Law Enforcement Ombudsman
• the broader Immigration Ombudsman role
• the handling by agencies of freedom of information requests.

The ‘Other agencies’ section of this chapter provides information about some of the range of complaints received about other agencies.

The chapter concludes with a section ‘Monitoring and inspections’ which summarises the work undertaken for Output 2—Review of statutory compliance in specified areas.

The number of approaches and complaints we receive about specific agencies usually reflects their level of interaction with members of the public. In general, the higher the number of direct transactions an agency has with members of the public, the more potential there is for things to go wrong. While we see only a very small proportion of complaints compared to the number of decisions and actions taken by agencies, those complaints can shed useful light on the problems people can face in dealing with government and areas for improving administration. The figures given for numbers of approaches and complaints include a small number of matters that are out of jurisdiction for the Ombudsman.

Figure 7.1 shows the number of approaches and complaints received in 2006–07 about agencies within the Ombudsman’s jurisdiction. Detailed information by portfolio and agency is provided in Appendix 4—Statistics.