The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) is responsible for issuing passports to Australian citizens in line with the Passport Act, with delivery of passport services in Australia and overseas being one of DFAT’s three key outcomes.

In July 2006, DFAT created the Australian Passport Office (APO) as a separate division to provide passport services. DFAT has offices in each Australian capital city to deliver passport services and works with DFAT diplomatic and consular missions to provide services to Australians located overseas.

The efficiency of DFAT’s processing of passport applications is important to the ability of Australian citizens to travel overseas and ensuring the process obtains the most benefit from available resources.

The objective of the audit was to assess the efficiency of DFAT’s delivery of passport services through the Australian Passport Office. To form a conclusion against the audit objective, the following high-level criteria were adopted:

• Has DFAT put in place efficient processes for the processing of passport applications?
• Is DFAT’s processing of passport applications efficient?

Key findings:

• DFAT has not been efficiently delivering passport services. While the department has timeframe targets for processing applications those targets are not customer focused and are not being consistently met. There are no resource efficiency targets; the average cost to produce a passport has increased more than the increase in the price of labour; and staff efficiency, which was improving up until the COVID-19 pandemic, has deteriorated since the international border was reopened.
• Processes are partly in place for the efficient processing of passport applications. The arrangements focus on timeliness of processing with insufficient attention given to resource efficiency.