Frugal Australian Crime Commission gets office makeover

THE nation's top crime-fighting agency has cut back on investigators while spending hundreds of thousands on optional extras.

New offices of the Australian Crime Commission in Sydney which were designed by Philip Ward Architects and Geyer.

THE nation's top crime-fighting agency has cut back on investigators while spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on optional extras - including a Mormon business guru - and replacing "walk-through" Lycra office walls that were supposed to engender trust among staff.

The Australian Crime Commission has merged the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs National Intelligence Taskforce, shut down its deep-cover investigation unit and cut dozens of experienced investigators during the past five years, according to ACC sources.

Yet during the same period, according to an agencies tenders' lists, senior management opted to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on activities that do not directly relate to investigating criminals.

In Sydney, the ACC is now spending about $500,000 refitting its office, including altering a radical interior design that had used walls made of Lycra.

The flexible cloth walls installed about five years ago left staff who were investigating some of the nation's most dangerous criminal networks, such as the Melbourne gangland outfits and the mafia, working in see-through, hear-through office space. This could easily be breached by pulling back the Lycra, according to ACC sources.

"You could almost walk through the walls. It was the wrong thing to have in an environment where it was 'need to know' because of the type of investigations," one source said.

ACC chief executive John Lawler said this week a staff survey had "identified issues with the office configuration".

The Sydney refit was expected to cost $647,000, including about $141,500 for maintenance. The ACC has said the lycra walls were on floors that were locked off.

Another non-crime-related expense was to improve "a green building rating", resulting in about $61,000 in costs for plants and maintenance since 2007.

Most was spent to maintain a hanging wall garden in the ACC's Canberra building, which cost about $6 million when it was completed in 2007 and "achieved a five-star Australian building greenhouse rating".

The agency also paid tens of thousands of dollars for executive training seminars and talk fests for top management.

In 2008, the ACC paid $10,170 in registration fees to Red Carpet for an "upclose" seminar with US new-age Mormon business guru Stephen Covey.

Another seminar, or training exercise, involved seven general managers and executive directors having two-hour personal coaching sessions at a cost of $107,960 from consultancy Yellow Edge.

Value Creation Group was paid about $70,000 for "values focusing workshops" in 2007.

Mr Lawler said the fees were for "design, facilitation of and reporting on staff workshops".

The ACC also spent $47,360 at the Aitken Hill conference centre near Melbourne in 2007 for conferences relating to an "intelligence leadership program" and "building business capacity" - part of the commission's "learning and development programs" for staff.

Mr Lawler, appointed in March last year, said there was a "regime of robust expenditure control" to ensure value for money and savings were likely to result in more staff being hired in 2010-11.

He had introduced efficiency measures, such as reinvigorating the audit committee and its focus on risk management, and invited the ombudsman to review the agency's critical processes.

Former NSW assistant police commissioner Clive Small slammed the expenditure as unlikely to help the agency catch more criminals.

"With all this expenditure on other matters it's no wonder they don't appear to have money to undertake important investigations or genuine intelligence analysis," he said.