If Centrelink, the NDIA or Home Affairs gets something wrong and will not fix it, the Commonwealth Ombudsman is where you are told to go. The service is free, it is independent, and the law that created it says the Ombudsman "shall investigate" complaints about the administrative actions of federal agencies.
In 2024-25 the Office finalised 10,832 complaints about Commonwealth agencies. It formally investigated 185 of them. That is 1.7 per cent.
It was not always so. In 2001-02 the Office investigated about 31 per cent of the complaint issues it finalised. In 2010-11 it investigated 22 per cent of complaints. By 2018-19 the figure was 6 per cent. For the next four annual reports the number was not published at all. When it reappeared, it was 3.7 per cent for 2022-23 and 1.8 per cent for 2023-24. The way the Office counts investigations narrowed over those years, so the figures are not exactly like for like, but the direction is not in doubt.
The Ombudsman is not a regulator. It cannot fine anyone or overturn a decision. It can look, it can form a view, and it can recommend. Its power lies in looking, and the law gives it wide room to decide not to: an investigation can be declined if it is "not warranted having regard to all the circumstances". There is no right of appeal against that decision.
Slower, and people have noticed
The Office sets its own service standards. It has missed its headline target in each of the last five years it has reported on. In 2022-23 it met its standards 24 per cent of the time against a target of 90 per cent. In 2024-25, under a new measure, it met 50 per cent against a target of 80 per cent. Of its five timeliness standards, it met one.
Complainants are surveyed each quarter. In 2019-20, 66 per cent said they were satisfied. In 2024-25 it was 36 per cent. The Office's annual report lists the main reasons people gave: the issue was not resolved, a lack of communication, cases not being investigated, and the time taken.
The Ombudsman, Iain Anderson, has not hidden from this. "I acknowledge that this year again our performance results reflect that we have not met our complaint handling standards, particularly our timeliness in resolving complaints," he wrote in the 2024-25 report.
The size of the backlog is not in the annual report. It came out at Senate estimates in May 2026: 7,441 complaints open, 574 of them more than a year old. The oldest, the Office later confirmed, had been open for three years and two months.
The Office's explanation
The Office gives two main reasons. A backlog built up during the pandemic. And it has been handed new jobs without the money to do them. It is also replacing a complaint management system it describes as ageing.
The funding point has substance. The Commonwealth Ombudsman is now also the ombudsman for defence personnel, postal customers, overseas students, private health insurance, vocational student loans and, since February 2025, university students. It inspects police use of covert powers and monitors places of detention. Complaints about Commonwealth agencies are now fewer than half of the complaints it receives. In its 2022-23 report the Office said unfunded and under-funded roles "took resources away from our existing core functions to the detriment of those functions".
There is also a fair argument that a formal investigation is not the only way to help. A phone call to the agency can fix a problem in a day. But the Office does not publish how many complaints are resolved that way, or what people got. It stopped publishing the share of investigations that found agency error after 2011-12, and the number of remedies after 2017-18. The public is asked to take the informal outcomes on trust.
Where it does well
The other half of the job is finding problems that affect thousands of people, and here the record is strong.
In 2023 the Office found that Services Australia had for years been unlawfully apportioning income when calculating welfare payments. In 2025 it found that the actions of two agencies in cancelling income support payments under the Targeted Compliance Framework were not lawful. It reported that the child support system was being used as a tool of financial abuse. In 2024-25, agencies accepted 124 of its 136 formal recommendations in full or in part.
These reports say "unlawful" when that is what the evidence shows. That matters because of what came before.
The shadow of Robodebt
The Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme found that in 2017 two departments deceived the Ombudsman's Office and withheld documents. It also found the Office did not use its compulsory powers, gave the department drafts of its report to edit, and removed its own draft text questioning whether the scheme was legal. The investigation, the Commission said, "did more harm than good", and the report gave the scheme "a veneer of legitimacy which enabled it to continue".
Mr Anderson, appointed in 2022, accepted those findings. Parliament has since given the Office new powers to reach directly into agency records, and a duty on public servants to assist. The recent investigations suggest the lesson has been learned at the systemic level.
The gap
The Office is good at the large investigation and poor, on its own numbers, at the individual complaint. Its own July 2026 statement says: "Managing complaints is our core business".
A performance audit by the Auditor-General in 2022 found the Office "largely effective" at managing complaints. That audit covered the period to mid-2021, before the worst results.
The Act sets up no parliamentary committee to oversee the Ombudsman and, for its main jurisdiction, does not require the Office to report how many complaints it declines, investigates or upholds. What the public knows is what the Office chooses to print. For several years it chose to print less.
Regulator Review's proposed grade is D: strong systemic work, weighed against five years of missed service targets and too little published evidence about what happens to the 98 per cent of complaints that are not formally investigated.
The full analysis and sources are in the accompanying report.