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Newspaper disclosures of unsatisfactory corruption probes suggest a standing body to supervise and help those guarding the till.
The Australian Public Service may have come of age. A quarter of a century after state services began, one by one, setting up independent commissions against corruption, crime and misconduct agencies, and standing anti-corruption bodies, it looks as if the Commonwealth needs much the same thing.
The evidence is not (yet) to be found in signs of endemic corruption, or of that culture of complacency and sleaze so evident in Queensland and NSW before they pioneered such paths. Nor in a want of anti-corruption systems on paper.
The APS has generally good internal and external audit systems, reasonably exemplary rules of fair and transparent public tenders, appointments to public bodies and systems designed to prevent the hiring and promotion of one's friends, relations and lovers. Lots of pamphlets address ''risk management'', encourage adherence to codes of conduct, and provide for whistleblowers or people with nagging worries about the propriety of the conduct of others. The Financial Management Act is of world class so far as it applies to the proper stewardship of public money (though parliament is an international disgrace - in a Libyan league - for the language it now permits to be used for words appropriating money).
The Audit Office issues booklets reinforcing ideas of accountability. So does the Finance and the Public Service Commission. Senior public servants know that it they fail to ''show leadership'' in such matters, or speak disparagingly of standards to be expected, they will lose marks.
The Commonwealth even has an Anti-Corruption Plan, focused on fraud consciousness and prevention. It is supposed to identify systemic weaknesses in federal and state agencies.
So what's the panic?
A series of articles in the Sydney Morning Herald by Linton Besser over the past month invite questions about the appearance and the reality. The questions will not be answered by the usual bland assurances.
Besser has used the FoI Act to ask agencies about investigations into cases of possible fraud or corruption. The responses, even with heavily blacked out sections, show many investigations. That's not the problem. The fact of smoke does not prove fire; indeed it may suggest both a proactive agency and one whose ''proactivity'' operates as a deterrence, given that it increases the risk of detection.
What is dismaying - suggestive of the need for a lot more external supervision - is evidence of hamstrung investigators, getting unsatisfactory and inconclusive results.
Here's a few examples: