  The accretion efficiency for individual black holes is very difficult to
determine accurately. There are many factors that can influence each step of
the calculation, such as the dust and host galaxy contribution to the observed
luminosity, the black hole mass and more importantly, the uncertainties on the
bolometric luminosity measurement. Ideally, we would measure the AGN emission
at every wavelength, remove the host galaxy and dust, reconstruct the AGN
spectral energy distribution and integrate to determine the intrinsic emission
and the accretion rate. In reality, this is not possible due to observational
limitations and our own galaxy line of sight obscuration. We have then to infer
the bolometric luminosity from spectral measurements made in discontinuous
wavebands and at different epochs. In this paper we tackle this issue by
exploring different methods to determine the bolometric luminosity. We first
explore the trend of accretion efficiency with black hole mass (efficiency
proportional to M^{\sim 0.5}) found in recent work by Davis & Laor and discuss
why this is most likely an artefact of the parameter space covered by their PG
quasar sample. We then target small samples of AGN at different redshifts,
luminosities and black hole masses to investigate the possible methods to
calculate the accretion efficiency. For these sources we are able to determine
the mass accretion rate and, with some assumptions, the accretion efficiency
distributions. Even though we select the sources for which we are able to
determine the parameters more accurately, there are still factors affecting the
measurements that are hard to constrain. We suggest methods to overcome these
problems based on contemporaneous multi-wavelength data measurements and
specifically targeted observations for AGN in different black hole mass ranges.
