The head of the New South Wales Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) has defended the body's role amid legal challenges from people against whom it has made corruption findings.

Commissioner Megan Latham told the ABC she did not take the job to be popular.

"When people have a great deal to lose you can expect them to take every step that they're entitled to take for the purposes of defending their reputations," she said.

"I don't think any commissioner takes this job to be popular and I don't think that you can be too naive about the fact that at some point or other you're going to upset somebody, it's the nature of the work."

Ms Latham rejected criticisms by ICAC inspector David Levine who, in a report earlier this year, suggested the body was "arrogant" and pointed to a rising number of complaints.

"The inspector is there to do his job," she said.

"The comments ... were in the opening introduction to the report. The body of the report itself did not substantiate any complaint that had been made to him in the last financial year, it did not substantiate any claim of maladministration and it did not in fact give us any particulars which we might have thought could have supported an allegation of arrogance."

Among those who have legally challenged ICAC corruption findings are former NSW Labor powerbroker Eddie Obeid and former Newcastle lord mayor Jeff McCloy.

Since challenges were made in the NSW Supreme Court and the High Court, the NSW Parliament has amended legislation to shore up ICAC's powers to make corruption findings.

The body has also been limited to only making such findings where it finds "serious" corruption.

Ms Latham said ICAC had no interest in running prosecutions, an idea she said had sprung from "misguided controversy" about the impact of some recent legislative changes.

"It doesn't represent any substantive change at all in relation to the way that we operate and certainly we have never and will never and do not want to ever have carriage of a prosecution," she said.

Speaking to the ABC on the sidelines of an anti-corruption forum in Brisbane co-sponsored by ICAC, Ms Latham said she had been inspired by a speech by Mexican journalist and human rights activist Lydia Cacho.

Ms Cacho told the conference yesterday about an encounter in a restaurant in Mexico with a drug cartel boss who had offered to assassinate all the state governors and government officials she suspected of being corrupt, telling the activist they had a shared hatred of corrupt officials.

"You have to be fearless and there will be people who will try and stop you or put you off and shut you down or whatever," Ms Latham said.

"But agencies who undertake this kind of work are always going to be unpopular in some quarters and you have to just put your head down and do the work that you are there to do."