From compliance to confidence: reframing probity as a core public sector capability    

Friday, 10 July 2026

If you were to ask most public sector procurement professionals what probity means, you will hear a reasonably consistent answer: declare conflicts of interest, keep tender documents secure, follow the evaluation criteria, document your decisions. Of course, these responses are not wrong, but they describe the minimum, not the capability. The gap between probity as compliance and probity as confidence is where many of the most significant procurement failures in recent years have occurred.

A pattern worth examining

The past two years have produced a series of instructive examples. In 2024, an audit of the $550 million Australian War Memorial redevelopment found that multiple contracts were awarded without ministerial oversight, prior relationships were not disclosed, and contract splitting was used to bypass approval thresholds. The same year, approximately 75 per cent of Tourism Australia’s procurement budget was directed to third-party contractors without competitive tendering, in direct contravention of the Commonwealth Procurement Rules.

Neither of these failures was the result of officials who did not know that probity rules existed. They were the result of organisations where probity had become a peripheral consideration, something managed by legal and audit functions rather than embedded in the day-to-day judgement of the people making procurement decisions. That is the distinction that matters.

These Commonwealth examples are not isolated. The same pattern recurs across state and territory governments, where integrity commissions regularly expose procurement failures of exactly this kind. In April 2026, the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption found in Operation Landan that the former chief executive of School Infrastructure NSW directed lucrative contracts and roles to friends and associates intended for school projects. Similar matters recur interstate: Victoria’s Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission (IBAC) found in Operation Dorset that a council project manager helped an associate win more than $16 million in contracts while taking cash and gifts, and a Queensland Crime and Corruption Commission (CCC) investigation led to a former Racing Queensland manager pleading guilty to procurement-related fraud. These failure modes match the Commonwealth examples: probity treated as a process to navigate rather than a judgement to exercise.

Commonwealth Rules

The revised Commonwealth Procurement Rules (CPR), which took effect in November 2025, reinforce this point explicitly. The CPRs require officials to conduct due diligence across the procurement lifecycle and for the duration of a contract, not only at the evaluation stage. Probity arrangements must be considered at every phase, from defining requirements and going to market through to contract management and closeout.

The updated rules also extend ethical obligations further into supplier assessment. Officials must now consider a supplier’s historic performance and ethical conduct as part of value-for-money analysis, and must make reasonable enquiries to verify compliance with labour regulations and environmental requirements. These are not administrative additions. They are substantive judgements that require capability, not just compliance.

While the CPRs bind only Commonwealth entities, the states and territories operate under parallel regimes, including the NSW Procurement Policy Framework. The instruments differ, but the principle is consistent: probity is an active obligation across the whole engagement.

From sign-off to sustained practice

The organisations that handle procurement probity well share a common characteristic: they have conscientiously made it a practitioner skill rather than a governance event. Probity in these settings is not something that happens when an adviser is engaged or a register is signed. It is the lens through which procurement professionals assess situations as they arise: when a supplier relationship feels uncomfortable, when a brief is written in a way that appears to favour one vendor, when a variation request arrives late in a contract and the documentation does not clearly justify the change.

The Australian National Audit Office reinforced this in its December 2025 Audit Matters bulletin, noting that internal probity guidelines need to be actively followed, documented and applied to decision-making as procurements progress, and that weaknesses in governance and documentation can limit transparency over how key decisions are made. The emphasis on active application, not passive awareness, is significant.

State bodies reach the same conclusion. ICAC reports that around 30 per cent of its public inquiries make findings of corrupt conduct related to procurement, and that agency controls often do not extend beyond written documents and training, which alone addresses only a small part of the risk. The common thread is that the failure point is rarely ignorance of the rules, but the absence of active, documented probity judgement.

The confidence dividend

When probity is embedded as a capability rather treated as a compliance exercise, it changes what procurement professionals can do. They can engage more openly with market participants during pre-procurement, because they understand what constitutes legitimate market engagement versus what creates a probity risk. They can structure evaluations more confidently, because they understand the principles behind conflict-of-interest management rather than just the rule to declare. They can advise decision-makers more effectively, because they can articulate the probity dimensions of a proposed approach, not just flag that a box has been checked.

This is the confidence dividend: the ability to apply judgement rather than consult a checklist. It does not eliminate the need for documentation, advisers, or formal processes. It makes those tools more effective because the people using them understand what they are for.

When to use probity advisers and when not to

External probity advisers and probity auditors serve a real function, but they are most effective when used deliberately rather than reflexively. NSW Government guidance is explicit that using external probity practitioners should be the exception, not the rule, and that engaging a probity adviser does not outsource accountability: the agency remains accountable regardless of who is advising the process.

The case for engaging an external probity adviser is the strongest where the integrity of the process is likely to be questioned, the procurement is complex and high-value, or the evaluation panel has relationships with tenderers that create real or perceived conflict risk. At the Commonwealth level, the Department of Finance distinguishes between a probity adviser, who provides practical guidance throughout the process, and a probity auditor, who provides an independent opinion on whether probity requirements were met after the fact. These are different engagements with different independence requirements, and the same person cannot serve both functions for the same procurement.

The right question is not whether a probity adviser should be engaged, but whether the people conducting the procurement have the capability to identify the situations that genuinely warrant one.

Building not outsourcing the capability

Treating probity as a capability requires investment in how procurement professionals learn and develop. It means moving beyond induction-style training that covers the rules, toward development that builds the judgement to apply them in ambiguous situations. It means creating environments where probity questions are raised and discussed during procurement planning, not escalated to legal only after something has gone wrong.

Organisations that are serious about this shift are increasingly building probity literacy into their broader procurement capability frameworks, alongside commercial skills, stakeholder management, and contract administration. This holds equally for Commonwealth departments and for state and territory agencies, each answerable to its own audit office and integrity oversight. AcademyGlobal’s procurement and contracting programs are designed with this integrated approach in mind, building the professional judgement that underpins sound procurement practice at every stage of the lifecycle.

The 2024 audit findings did not reveal a shortage of probity rules in the Australian public sector. They revealed a shortage of embedded probity capability. That is a more demanding problem to address, but also a more tractable one, because capability can be deliberately built in ways that rules alone cannot achieve.

About the Author

Paul Vorbach MCom, LLM, MBA, FCG, F.ISRM, FAICD, FGIA is the Founder and Managing Director of AcademyGlobal, a Sydney-based capability development firm established in 2004 that has delivered training in more than twenty countries across five continents. With over 20 years of global experience, Paul has trained contract management, procurement and supply chain professionals across Australia, the Middle East, and Asia, and has taught at post-graduate university level and for leading professional associations. He is Vice President of the Institute of Strategic Risk Management (ISRM) and Adjunct Academic at the Australian Graduate School of Management (AGSM) at the University of New South Wales.

AcademyGlobal partners with public sector, private sector, and not-for-profit organisations to build the capability that underpins sustainable delivery performance. AcademyGlobal is the Chartered Institute of Procurement and Supply (CIPS) Centre of Excellence for Australia, New Zealand and Asia, regional partner of the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy (CIPFA), and the first Australasian Procurement and Construction Council (APCC)-certified provider of the Diploma and Advanced Diploma of Procurement and Contracting through its partnership with the University of Queensland (UQ Skills).

Paul’s full profile is available at academyglobal.com/paul-vorbach and on LinkedIn.