The role of the Australian Commission for Law Enforcement Integrity (ACLEI) is to support the Integrity Commissioner to provide independent assurance to the Australian Government about the integrity of prescribed law enforcement agencies and their staff. The office of the Integrity Commissioner, and ACLEI, are established by the Law Enforcement Integrity Commissioner Act 2006 (LEIC Act).

ACLEI’s stated purpose is to make it more difficult for corruption in law enforcement agencies to occur or to remain undetected. ACLEI undertakes a range of detection, investigation and prevention activities to deliver on its purpose and fulfil requirements under the LEIC Act.

This topic was selected for audit as part of a series of performance audits focussing on the efficiency of entities. ACLEI plays an important role in the Australian Government’s law enforcement framework and has undergone various changes to its funding and jurisdiction over the past 10 years. ACLEI has not previously been the subject of an ANAO performance audit.

The objective of this audit was to examine the efficiency of ACLEI in detecting, investigating and preventing corrupt conduct. To form a conclusion against the audit objective, the following high level criteria were adopted:

• Has ACLEI established appropriate arrangements to assess its efficient use of resources?
• How well does ACLEI’s efficiency compare with comparable entities and its own previous performance?

The audit objective and scope does not include assessing ACLEI’s operational effectiveness and no conclusions are made on this issue. The audit also did not seek to form a conclusion on the adequacy of ACLEI’s resourcing.