Senior public servants in the Australian state of Victoria concealed losses suspected to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars from flawed Covid-19 business support payments, according to an investigation by the Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission (Ibac).
The Ibac report, titled Operation Harmonia, found that decisions were made to withhold information about the scale of the losses, and misleading information was subsequently created and disseminated over an extended period. The investigation revealed that the Victorian government spent an estimated $257 million on support grants to 9,000 ineligible businesses during the pandemic.
The report, tabled in parliament on Thursday, probed the conduct of officers within the former Department of Jobs, Precincts and Regions. It found that by mid-2021, the government department was aware of potential issues with its use of GST as a metric. When the true scale of the losses, suspected to be as high as $285 million, became apparent, an associate secretary and deputy secretary chose to withhold this information from their superiors.
The deputy secretary reportedly directed that all information about the suspected losses be removed from a draft report intended for the then-minister for Industry Support and Recovery, Martin Pakula, and the Victorian Auditor General’s Office. Ibac also found that in 2022, a brief prepared for then-minister Ben Carroll contained "false and misleading" information, claiming his predecessor, Pakula, had approved the department's approach and that no payments were made in error. Ibac commissioner Victoria Elliott stated that the conduct exposed fell short of expectations for senior public officers.