Treasury officials have been accused of being asleep at the wheel on breaches of confidential government information.
Officials were grilled on their knowledge of potential breaches of confidential Treasury data by former PwC partner Peter Collins, who has been referred to federal police to investigate the allegations.
Greens senator Barbara Pocock hit out at Treasury’s decision to sign new confidentiality agreements with Mr Collins after they became aware of a possible breach.
While Treasury officials told the committee they had “very little information” at the time, and they passed on knowledge to the ATO for their investigation, Senator Pocock said it wasn’t enough.
“A possible breach of something with a criminal consequence comes to you, and you don’t have alarm bells go off? I am shocked,” she said.
“That is inappropriate. That is sleeping at the wheel in my view, this is a very important matter with millions and millions of dollars.”
Treasury deputy secretary Roxanne Kelley told the inquiry a review of secrecy provisions would prevent a repeat of information not being able to be shared between the department and the ATO.
“We understand the public consultation on that review has finished and (the attorney-general’s department) is in the throes of finalising the report,” she said.
Finance department officials told the committee all Commonwealth contracts had conflict-of-interest clauses and required people who accessed sensitive data to sign confidentiality arrangements.
Deputy secretary Andrew Danks said unauthorised information sharing would trigger a breach, but departments needed to take a “contract management approach” to find out if this had occurred.
“We can’t go into every consultancy to see who has got our information,” he said.
“But if we do find out that things have been released or confidential information has been breached, that’s where we have the termination clauses in contracts to consider.”
The committee considered publishing the names of the 72 PwC staff involved in the recent scandal but ultimately decided against it.
Senator Pocock told reporters she hoped the names would eventually be released.
“Some names on this list may well be innocent people who received an email – we know many others are not,” she said on Wednesday.
“We don’t want to throw anyone on the bus who has been an innocent player in this chapter. But this is on PwC.
“PwC knows who has done what and when, and they should be taking responsibility, rather than leaning on the Senate.”
Finance Minister Katy Gallagher wants the public service to ease its reliance on consultants.
“We saw a shift towards outsourcing public service jobs into the private sector,” she told ABC Radio on Wednesday.
“Obviously, the issues with PwC have highlighted that at an extreme end, but we’ve got a lot more to do to rebalance the public service (and) to make sure it’s there as the important institution that it was always intended to be.”
Australian Associated Press
