Auditor-General investigating breaches of public service laws at ACT Health

Auditor-General Dr Maxine Cooper on Friday announced the new audit, which will be the "first step" towards a potential wider audit of the health directorate's management of data and failures to report on its performance.

The audit, she said in a statement, would focus on specific allegations of breaches of the Public Sector Management Act, the laws governing the conduct of territory public servants, between May 2015 up to as recent as October last year.

While Dr Cooper's statement referred to the allegations as related to the "former performance information branch" in ACT Health, it is seems unlikely the investigation relates directly to a data doctoring scandal dating back to the Gallagher government in 2012.

The new audit will consider the way the allegations were handled by the performance information branch and allegations made by former staff of such breaches by senior executives in ACT Health at the time.

It would be the fourth audit of data-related problems in the directorate in the past eight years, and comes as the territory government awaits the findings of a "root and branch" review of the directorate's data reporting in coming weeks.

That review related to the directorate's failure to provide data to the Productivity Commission in time for last year's Report on Government Services, as well as a year-long failure to release any performance data on the directorate's operations.

Director-General Nicole Feely has also previously ordered a review of the problem by former NSW Auditor-General Bob Sendt, which has not been publicly released, and her directorate has spent over $1 million to to identify and fix the problems.

While Ms Fitzharris, as then-assistant health minister, was told of the data issues as early as May 2016, the government did not report anything publicly about the issues until after the October 2016 election.