The regulator of Australia's anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing regime, Austrac, has come in for plenty of criticism in submissions to a government review of the AML/CTF Act.Austrac came under fire for the quality of its supervision, a lack of staff capacity, and inadequate disclosure on a range of issues, including compliance, supervision outcomes and emerging risks.Not one of 30 submissions to the review, being conducted by the Attorney-General's Department, praised its performance.The Australian Bankers Association said the quality of Austrac's supervision had fallen substantially since AML/CTF was introduced. The ABA said: "This [deterioration] is a direct impact of funding cuts. Austrac is currently poorly resourced and under-equipped to manage the load.""More funding is required for Austrac to provide an effective supervisory function and technical capability commensurate with the size and complexity of the regulated population."The government introduced a controversial change to Austrac's funding model in last month's Budget. Industry currently covers a little over half of Austrac's running costs through payment of an annual levy. The industry contribution to covering total expense will rise to 70 per cent in 2014/15, 90 per cent in 2015/16 and 2016/17, and then 100 per cent in 2017/18.The Australian Finance Conference echoed the ABA's views, saying: "The supervisory approach has deteriorated over the past three to five years due to budget and funding cuts affecting Austrac, such that Austrac staff may not have sufficient capability and capacity to appropriately evaluate a reporting entity's business and ML/TF risk." The Justice and International Mission Unit of the Uniting Church of Australia said that Austrac should be doing more investigation and reporting on compliance. It said the UK Financial System Authority did a better job in this regard.The Association of Superannuation Funds of Australia said the current speed and dissemination of information by Austrac about emerging trends was inadequate.ASFA said the outcomes of Austrac's monitoring activities needed to be made public if there was an intention to work towards improving effectiveness. "Currently, supervision outcomes are rarely revealed. This lack of transparency has the potential to encourage complacency [about risks]," ASFA said"Communications channels between Austrac and ASFA could be improved. At the moment the flow of information is one-sided - from superannuation trustees to Austrac."