Two investigations into Paul Brereton, the corruption watchdog's first commissioner, will not be completed. Gail Furness SC, who oversees the National Anti-Corruption Commission as Inspector, announced on Wednesday that finishing the draft reports couldn't be justified now Brereton has left the job. She said the underlying systemic issues had already been addressed The Guardian.

Brereton was appointed to a five-year term but quit after three, announcing his resignation at a Senate estimates hearing in May 2026. His tenure formally ended on 6 July The Guardian. These two discontinued inquiries are the last significant unfinished business from his time running the agency.

The first investigation looked at Brereton's failure to properly declare conflicts of interest. He held a role connected to the Inspector-General of the Australian Defence Force's office while simultaneously overseeing defence-related referrals to the NACC between July 2023 and October 2025. Before Brereton declared the conflict, Furness's office had received 98 defence-related referrals. She hadn't finished analysing them when she decided to close the matter The Guardian.

Underlying the first inquiry was a legal question: whether Brereton breached public governance laws. His lawyers contested this. Furness decided the question no longer needed answering once he'd left office — a practical judgment, but one that leaves the legal question permanently untested.

The second investigation started from a complaint in December 2025 about Brereton's conduct in connection with two separate NACC operations. Details remain confidential. Furness cited safety concerns for the complainant and noted that Brereton's lawyers had also contested this matter. That combination — a safety-sensitive source and a former commissioner with no current position to answer for — gave Furness grounds to close the inquiry without public findings The Guardian.

Furness justified the decision on two grounds: cost and her assessment that systemic problems had been fixed. She pointed to changes in how the NACC handles conflict of interest declarations. Whether that addresses demands for a public accounting of how an inaugural corruption commissioner managed 98 defence referrals without resolving his own conflicts is another matter — one her statement doesn't really engage with.

There's an irony worth pausing on. Parliament created the NACC because it decided transparency and accountability mattered more than the cost and discomfort of scrutiny. That was the entire argument for a federal integrity body. Furness now says the cost of scrutinising the agency's own founding commissioner cannot be justified once he's outside the role. That's an internally consistent institutional argument. It's also exactly the kind of cost-benefit calculation that corruption watchdogs are supposed to resist when the subjects are powerful.

Furness was appointed Inspector until 30 June 2030 — well past Brereton's departure, giving her institutional independence from the NACC itself NACC Inspector. Her office exists to check the commission when it cannot check itself. That she has now closed the two most significant complaints against the agency's founding commissioner without findings, rather than with them, will sit uneasily with anyone expecting the office to model the same rigour it demands of the bodies it oversees.

Brereton does not escape scrutiny entirely. The 98 defence referrals themselves still exist in the NACC's systems, and whoever succeeds him inherits whatever residue those matters left. But the formal record on his conduct as commissioner now closes with two discontinued files rather than two findings — a distinction that matters to anyone assessing how the NACC's accountability architecture worked in its first real test.