Opening Statement to the Joint Senate Committee on the Australian Commission for Law Enforcement Integrity - February 2022

Renée Roberts, Executive Director of Policy and Advice - Senate Economics Inquiry into Expansion of ACLEI’s jurisdiction and the corruption vulnerabilities of law enforcement agencies’ contracted services, Canberra

Thank you for the opportunity to appear today. I am joined by my colleagues, Peter Rohde and Warren Scott. Warren is our General Counsel and Peter our Chief Risk Officer. APRA has made a submission to the Inquiry, which we hope is helpful in providing some context. 

I’ll briefly touch on a few key points in these brief opening remarks today and we are then happy to take questions.

As the Committee will be aware, APRA came under ACLEI’s jurisdiction on 1 January 2021 with respect to corrupt conduct that relates to the performance of APRA’s law enforcement function.

Since this time, APRA has been engaging closely with ACLEI, including via regular liaison meetings, to ensure a smooth induction to ACLEI’s jurisdiction and we are working well together.

APRA continues to reinforce with our employees the various obligations we have regarding integrity, corruption, conflicts management, information security and the like and remind staff of the processes in place to report potential corruption within APRA.

As outlined in our submission, APRA takes corruption very seriously and acknowledges that a key part in addressing corruption is taking all steps to prevent such conduct from occurring. APRA has benefited and gained useful insights from the work of ACLEI, particularly from ACLEI’s Corruption Prevention team.

In relation to corruption vulnerabilities, these are managed across all of our business functions. Our internal frameworks and policies for managing enterprise risk extend beyond corruption prevention and, as outlined in our submission, cover a wide range of activities that are closely linked with corruption prevention. These frameworks and policies are in place and are in addition to the requirements set out in the Commonwealth procurement rules.

APRA welcomes the extension of ACLEI’s jurisdiction to the additional regulators including ourselves.