Senior Victorian public servants hid loss of up to $285m from Covid grants given to ineligible businesses

Whistleblowers applauded as Ibac finds ‘decisions were made to withhold information about the magnitude of the loss’

Senior public servants in one state covered up losses suspected to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars arising from flawed Covid-19 business support payments, an investigation has found.

An investigation by the integrity watchdog has found senior officials within the department responsible for making those payments covered up the extent of the losses from their managers.

“Decisions were made to withhold information about the magnitude of the loss and misleading information was subsequently created and disseminated over an extended period of time.”

It concerned their response to revelations the department had granted millions in support payments to ineligible businesses during the early days of the pandemic.

When the true scale of the losses came into view, suspected to be as high as $285m, the associate secretary and deputy secretary opted to withhold that information from their superiors, the report said.

Ibac found that in 2022, after the auditor general opened an audit of the grants, the deputy secretary prepared a brief to then-minister Ben Carroll, which contained “false and misleading” information.

The watchdog made no adverse findings against Carroll, who now serves as Victorian premier.

“This special report exposes serious failures by senior public officers, and informing Victorians of these findings is crucial in promoting transparency and accountability in the public sector,” she said.

“I want to applaud the whistleblowers who came forward to Ibac in Operation Harmonia,” Elliot said.