The only body in this database whose function is to say, publicly, that an administrative process was wrong.

It matters here because most of the failures this project records are invisible by construction. A queue nobody publishes, a take-up rate nobody measures, a refusal with no review right — none of these generates a finding. The Ombudsman produces the rare artefact that does.

Its 2024 and 2025 work on the Targeted Compliance Framework is the sharpest example. It found that 964 people had income support unlawfully cancelled between April 2022 and July 2024, and that both the cancellations and the remediation process that followed were neither fair nor reasonable.

Independent analysis by Economic Justice Australia put the number of people potentially affected by unlawful payment cancellations at more than 300,000, a figure the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations acknowledged at Senate Estimates as being "in the vicinity of that".

Nine hundred and sixty-four is what an investigation with finite resources confirmed. Three hundred thousand is what the scale of the system suggests. The distance between those two numbers is the reason oversight bodies matter and the reason they are never enough.