Two investigations into former NACC commissioner Paul Brereton will not be completed, the corruption watchdog's own overseer announced on Wednesday. NACC Inspector Gail Furness SC said the cost of finishing draft reports could not be justified now that Brereton has left the job, and that she was satisfied the underlying systemic issues had already been addressed The Guardian.

Brereton was the National Anti-Corruption Commission's inaugural commissioner, appointed to a five-year term but serving only three before quitting. He flagged his resignation at a Senate estimates hearing in May 2026, and his tenure formally ended on 6 July The Guardian. That leaves the discontinued inquiries as the last significant piece of unfinished business from his time atop the agency he helped stand up.

The first investigation concerned Brereton's failure to appropriately declare conflicts of interest arising from his continuing role connected to the Inspector-General of the Australian Defence Force's office, while he was simultaneously overseeing defence-related referrals to the NACC between July 2023 and October 2025. Furness's office had received 98 defence-related referrals in the period before Brereton made his conflict of interest declaration, and she had not finished analysing them at the time she decided to close the matter The Guardian.

There was also an unresolved legal dispute at the centre of that inquiry: whether Brereton had breached public governance laws, a proposition his lawyers contested. Furness said that question no longer needed resolving once he left the role — a pragmatic call, but one that leaves the underlying legal question permanently untested.

The second, separate investigation stemmed from a complaint referred to Furness in December 2025, concerning a single instance of Brereton's conduct touching on two distinct NACC operations. Details of that complaint will stay largely confidential. Furness cited concerns for the complainant's safety, and noted that Brereton's lawyers had contested this matter as well The Guardian. That combination of factors — a safety-sensitive complainant and a resigned subject with no ongoing office to answer for — gave Furness cover to wind the matter up without a public reckoning of what exactly happened.

Furness's justification rests on two pillars: cost, and her assessment that the system has already fixed itself. She pointed to changes made to how the NACC handles conflict of interest declarations as grounds for concluding there are no lingering systemic problems to chase down. Whether that satisfies critics who wanted a public accounting of how an inaugural corruption commissioner came to sit on 98 defence referrals without resolving his own conflicts is a separate question, and one Furness's statement does not really engage with.

There is an irony worth sitting with here. The NACC exists because parliament decided the public interest in transparency and accountability outweighed the cost and discomfort of scrutiny — that was the entire case for a federal integrity body in the first place. Furness now says the cost of scrutinising the conduct of the commission's own founding commissioner cannot be justified, once he's no longer around to be held to account by it. That's a coherent institutional argument. It's also exactly the kind of resource-and-relevance calculation that corruption watchdogs are meant to resist making in cases involving the powerful.

Furness herself was appointed Inspector until 30 June 2030, a term that runs well past Brereton's departure and gives her institutional standing independent of the NACC itself NACC Inspector. Her office exists precisely to check the commission when the commission cannot check itself — the watchdog's watchdog, in the jargon. That she has now closed the two most consequential complaints against the agency's own inaugural commissioner without a finding, rather than with one, will sit uneasily with anyone who expected the office to model the same rigour it demands of the bodies it oversees.

None of this means Brereton escapes scrutiny entirely — the 98 referrals themselves presumably still exist somewhere in the NACC's systems, and whoever succeeds him inherits whatever residue those matters left behind. But the formal record on Brereton's own conduct as commissioner now closes with two discontinued files rather than two findings, a distinction that will matter to anyone assessing how the NACC's own accountability architecture performed in its first real test.