Australian Government
Auditing and Assurance Standards Board
If you wish to apply for access to one or more documents under the FOI Act, your application must:
Post your application to:
FOI Contact Officer
Auditing and Assurance Standards Board
PO Box 204
Collins Street West VIC 8007
Or send an email to FOI Contact Officer at [email protected].
The AUASB will advise you within 14 days that we have received your request.
We are required to provide you with a decision on your request within 30 days after the day of receipt. We may extend the 30-day processing period if we need to consult third parties, or where a charge is to be imposed for processing the request or for other reasons. You will be advised if there are changes to the 30-day processing period.
Once the FOI request has been processed, any available documents will be forwarded to you once any assessed charge is paid.
We may publish some documents we release to you on our FOI disclosure log within 10 working days of providing the documents to you.
We may refuse to process your request if a practical refusal reason exists. This may include:
We can refuse access to documents that are exempt. Further information about FOI exemptions is available in guidelines issued by the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner and available on the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner website.
The FOI Act permits agencies to exercise discretion to impose charges for processing requests. Charges are generally payable for time spent processing requests and are assessed in accordance with the Freedom of Information (Charges) Regulations 2019.
If we decide to impose a charge, we will give you a written notice containing an estimate of the amount of charge.
You can ask for a charge to be waived or reduced for any reason, including financial hardship or on the grounds of public interest. Evidence may be requested when seeking a waiver of charges.
Further information about charges is available on the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner website.
Charges are not payable:
When we have made a decision about your FOI request, we will send you a letter explaining our decision and your review and appeal rights.
You can ask for the following decisions to be reviewed:
A third party who disagrees with our decision to give you documents that contain information about them can also ask for our decision to be reviewed.
You can request in writing that we reconsider our decision through an internal review. An internal review will be conducted by another officer in our agency. We will advise you of our new decision within 30 days of receiving your request.
You can ask the Australian Information Commissioner to review our original decision or our decision on internal review within 60 days of the date of decision (or 30 days after you are notified if you are an affected third party). The Information Commissioner can affirm or vary the decision or substitute a new decision. The Information Commissioner may decide not to conduct a review in certain circumstances. More information is available at the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) website.
If you are unhappy with the way we have handled your request, you can submit a complaint to the Australian Information Commissioner who may investigate our actions. More information is available on the OAIC's website. The Commonwealth Ombudsman can also investigate complaints about our actions. However, the Commonwealth Ombudsman and the Information Commissioner will consult to avoid the same matter being investigated twice.
If you require more information, please contact the FOI Contact Officer on 03 8080 7400 or email [email protected]
Certain documents that we have released under the FOI Act can be obtained at our FOI disclosure log page.
Information is available about our Information Publication Scheme.