Guide to the Report

In developing the Commonwealth Ombudsman Annual Report, we set out to meet the parliamentary reporting requirements and to provide information to the community about the diverse nature of the complaints handled by our office.

There are a number of target audiences for our report, including members of parliament, Australian Government departments and agencies, other ombudsman offices, the media, potential employees and consultants, and the wider public. As some parts of the report will be of more interest to you than others, you can read this page to help work out which will be more useful. Each part is divided into sub-parts.

PERFORMANCE OVERVIEW

The Performance overview includes the Foreword which provides a broad summary of the year. Chapter 1— Organisation overview—gives an outline of the office’s role, responsibilities and the organisation’s structure. Chapter 2— Report on performance—summarises the office’s performance based on the outcomes and program structure set out in the Portfolio Budget Statements and Portfolio Additional Estimates Statements 2011–2012, and Chapter 3 details the office’s management and accountability arrangements.

THE OMBUDSMAN AT WORK

Chapter 4 assesses our work with our top five complaint agencies, and provides an overview of complaints and appproaches to our office. Chapter 5 provides case studies of remedies achieved for individual complainants and also examples of remedies that resulted in improved administration. Individual complaints can highlight a broader administrative problem that may affect many people. In these cases, the Ombudsman may recommend that an agency implement a systemic change or improvement that might include staff training or changing a process or procedure, for example. These case studies provide examples of how the office has improved administration.

Chapter 6 summarises the office’s published reports and submissions and Chapter 7 reports on the office’s specialist oversight functions, including as Defence Force Ombudsman, Law Enforcement Ombudsman, Immigration Ombudsman, Taxation Ombudsman, Postal Industry Ombudsman and Overseas Students Ombudsman. The chapter also reports on the office’s compliance auditing activities, our role within the international community of ombudsmen and the oversight role under the Australian Government’s Northern Territory Emergency Response and Closing the Gap initiatives in the Northern Territory.

Heads of departments and agencies were given the opportunity to comment on draft sections of this report that relate to their organisations.

APPENDICES AND REFERENCES

The appendices include: freedom of information reporting, statistics on the number of approaches and complaints received about individual Australian Government agencies; a list of consultants engaged during the year; and financial statements. Also included is a list of tables and figures contained in the body of the report, a list of acronyms and abbreviations, and the addresses of each of our offices.