At the end of 1999, a team of immigration analysts was facing a curious problem. Asked to compile statistics on where new migrants were living, the staff had to dig out original forms to match against later data. But as they moved through the department's old Cumberland Street offices in Sydney, they found scores of files had vanished.Click here to view interactive graphic
About the same time, another official arranging a citizenship ceremony was annoyed to find a child's name missing from a key certificate. He searched for a hard copy original to check the name but he came across the same problem. The file couldn't be found.
There was another link. That child's citizenship file and the documents missing from Cumberland Street had been handled by the same senior officer - David Moon. The missing papers were later found stashed inside his office.
It was later revealed 110 Chinese migrants whose applications Moon had approved should never have been granted citizenship. Moon had been taking thousands of dollars in kickbacks and luxury overseas holidays to illegally fast-track them through the system. In 2008, the 69-year-old was jailed.
Now, a Herald investigation has found evidence to suggest there may be hundreds of similar cases lying in wait. Confidential files obtained using freedom of information show thousands of allegations of graft and abuse of office are being levelled against government staff each year - but only a handful are properly investigated.
Last year, almost 1800 misconduct cases were handled inside just 5 per cent of the agencies that make up the federal government. In the past six years, more than 3200 investigations have been conducted inside the Department of Defence alone. Almost one-fifth of Australian Customs and Border Protection's workforce has been investigated since 2007 for offences including bribery and ''prohibited imports''.
In January, customs joined two law-enforcement bodies already under the purview of the Australian Commission for Law Enforcement Integrity, a corruption watchdog. But for the rest of the Commonwealth, no one is watching. Moon's is a salutary lesson because he wasn't exposed by someone blowing the whistle. There was no one inside the Department of Immigration who would have been willing or able to do anything with allegations that controversial - at one point, Moon simply declined to be interviewed by department officers.
The Australian Federal Police, which concentrates on drug trafficking and counter-terrorism, is reluctant to deal with Commonwealth fraud matters. It is likely the police took the case because the evidence was too conspicuous to ignore. There may be hundreds of bureaucrats in the public service who have previously been the target of internal investigations.
In one confidential memo obtained by the Herald, senior Department of Immigration personnel are told that several staff had resigned ''to avoid incurring a breach of the APS [Australian Public Service] code of conduct on their employment record and likelihood of serious sanction being imposed''.
This is not a rare occurrence. In the past six years, no fewer than 919 fraud investigations into Commonwealth public servants were prematurely terminated because they resigned.
THE senior executives who lead Canberra's public service promulgate the myth the Commonwealth does not have a corruption problem.
Carmel McGregor, then the acting public service commissioner, told a parliamentary law enforcement committee in mid-2009: ''There is no evidence that corruption … is widespread in the APS." That may be true. But it is also true that corruption in the Commonwealth government is just as prevalent as elsewhere in Australia.
Not only are a substantial number of allegations formally lodged every day against APS staff, but most of those are never independently examined. Previously unpublished audits obtained by the Herald record more than 3800 internal investigations in nine departments in roughly the past three years.
The Department of Defence has been home to another 1300 in the same period and there are scores of other agencies whose files remain secret. The Australian Taxation Office has conducted 883 internal investigations in the past two years.
Last year, in 10 agencies, there were 21 cases of alleged corruption, 65 conflicts of interest, and 247 cases of fraud.
The public has heard about none of these, and many, on the evidence seen by the Herald, appear to have been handled discreetly to avoid public embarrassment. Indeed, there were only 11 referrals to the federal police by the entire Commonwealth government last year.
The internal audit files obtained by the Herald also show widespread corruption risks - poorly-managed procurements worth many millions of dollars, shoddy information security measures such as passwords which are never expunged and a culture of rorting travel benefits, salary entitlements or department credit cards.
In 2007, Griffith University published data from a survey of 8000 public servants about fraud and misconduct.
Canberra scored as well, or as poorly, as NSW, Queensland and Western Australia, which all have corruption-busting agencies. A total of 22 per cent had direct evidence of the rorting of entitlements, 31 per cent had seen a cover-up of poor performance and 10 per cent had seen someone use their status to obtain personal favours.
More federal employees had seen money stolen, resources improperly used for personal gain or pornography downloaded to a work computer than their state counterparts.
Crucially, only marginally fewer Commonwealth employees (2.4 per cent) had direct evidence of the payment of bribes than those in NSW (2.9 per cent).
The Australian Public Service Commission guides the bureaucracy on values and conduct. The Australian National Audit Office audits spending and performance. The Commonwealth Ombudsman handles complaints. And almost every department has its own audit unit.
They say where cases of serious corruption emerge - Moon is an example, as is Nick Petroulias, the former assistant tax commissioner jailed in 2008 for selling classified information - the AFP has the powers needed to investigate. But there are several problems with this position.
''They have a conflict of interest,'' John McMillan, the former Commonwealth Ombudsman, says. ''They do not want to expose a weakness in their own procedures or have the public questioning the integrity of their process. By and large the interest of an agency is to avoid any publicity questioning … its efficiency or integrity.''
Of 500 internal fraud cases recorded in the Department of Immigration in the past two years, only six were referred to the AFP.
Last year, Centrelink investigated 337 of its employees for misconduct including conflicts of interest, fraud and abuse of office. In 2008, the Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs investigated 138 allegations that staff obtained a benefit by deception, and 475 misconduct cases between July 2007 and December 2009. How many cases were referred to the AFP by each agency in the past two years? One.
The reluctance of departments to bring ignominy upon themselves is one reason for the low rate of referrals - if someone has defrauded the agency it is because financial controls allowed them to do so. But there is another important reason. Internal investigators might find an invoice is missing, but they are unlikely to uncover one that was forged.
Then there are questions about the AFP's capacity to take up the cudgels. That it does so already is a myth, says Professor A.J.Brown,one of the country's most recognised public law experts. Unless the matter touches on criminality at the top end of the spectrum, the AFP has other priorities. ''There is currently no expectation [among Commonwealth agencies] that the AFP would ever help deal with other types of alleged official misconduct, such as conflicts of interest, even in complex or serious cases.''
Even the former AFP commissioner, Michael Keelty, has suggested as much. In 2006, he said the anti-corruption agency that oversees the AFP could have its jurisdiction expanded. ''If we are serious about this, and if it is not just a quick fix, then the AFP could benefit in its investigations if the ACLEI [Australian Commission for Law Enforcement Integrity] had a wider remit than what is proposed," he said.
FEDERAL governments have been forced to install a series of royal commissioners to address misconduct when it makes its way to the surface. Brown cites the Palmer and Comrie inquiries into the Department of Immigration which exposed a ''far-reaching pattern of systemic organisational failures''; the Cole inquiry into the payment of $220 million in bribes by AWB; and the Clarke inquiry into the government's handling of the Mohamed Haneef affair.
Then there is the Securency scandal. So far, eight executives and a former deputy chairman of the Reserve Bank of Australia have been charged here and overseas with the bribery of officials in Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam to secure banknote printing contracts.
This week, the government announced a ''National Anti-Corruption Plan'' at a cost of less than $700,000 which is to be compiled by people inside the Attorney-General's Department. The government says it will ''involve a thorough review of existing measures''.
But on Thursday, the Home Affairs and Justice Minister, Brendan O'Connor, said those around him had yet to present a compelling argument that Australia's largest body politic needs a standing royal commission.
The former diplomat and long-time Canberra watcher Bruce Haigh says such arguments are never going to be mounted by the vested powers that run the federal government. Corruption is not a topic discussed at dinner parties in Canberra.
''Canberra is a closed place,'' he says. ''There is a culture that we're separate and we're apart. It is a phony culture.''
