The federal bureaucracy is almost squeaky clean, say staff, who have reported the lowest level of suspected corruption in years.
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Just over one in 40 public servants (2.6 per cent) say they witnessed a colleague engage in behaviour serious enough to be viewed as corruption over the past year.
The result, published in the latest State of the Service Report, differs dramatically to past surveys: just three years ago, 15 per cent of employees said they had witnessed serious misconduct.
It follows a turbulent period for the bureaucracy: four customs official were convicted recently on drug-related charges, while the Reserve Bank bribery scandal has dragged through the courts.
But independent specialists doubt the apparent improvement, saying the Public Service Commission's survey was flawed and appeared designed to paint the bureaucracy is a good light.
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Public sector ethics expert Howard Whitton said state governments assumed that about one in five of their staff would engage in corrupt activity, and it was unlikely the federal public service was significantly different.
He said the commission had a vested interest in reporting an improvement and the Commonwealth has had a longstanding objection to anything that might disclose wrongdoing.
"The problem is they define misconduct in a particularly narrow way, and then present the figures only for official investigations and findings," Mr Whitton said.
"We all know a manager only sees 5 per cent of what's going on and then only prosecutes 10 per cent of that."
Among the few public servants who said they had seen corruption in their workplace, the most common types were nepotism and cronyism (44 per cent), failure to prevent a conflict of interest (29 per cent), and fraud, forgery or embezzlement (24 per cent).
The commission changed its survey methodology slightly this year, meaning most respondents were asked only if they had seen "corruption" but were not prompted specifically on whether they had seen cronyism, theft or other specific acts.
The survey defined corruption as "the dishonest or biased exercise of a ... public official's functions ... that would usually justify serious penalties, such as termination of employment or criminal prosecution".
A 2008 survey for the Whistling in the Australian Public Sector study found 73 per cent of federal public servants said they had direct evidence of wrongdoing. The most common misconduct was favouritism in selection or promotion (witnessed by 32 per cent of staff), covering up poor performance (31 per cent) and bullying (29 per cent).
The professor who led the 2008 study, Griffith University's A. J. Brown, said the commission's latest findings were misleading. He also criticised its decision to compare its findings with a Victorian survey, which had found 16 per cent of that state's public servants thought there was some or a lot of corruption in their agency.
"Given the importance of this issue and the fact that the question of perceived/experienced wrongdoing levels in the Commonwealth public sector has been an issue of public debate, I frankly find it very disturbing that the [commission] would either not understand, or would seek to actively gloss over the significance of these methodological differences in the way that it has reported these results and, more particularly, tried to draw that comparison with Victoria," Professor Brown said.
Mr Whitton, a visiting fellow at the University of Canberra's ANZSOG Institute for Governance, said favouritism in contracting was likely to be the federal bureaucracy's biggest corruption problem.
"The merit principle is widely ignored in the public service," he said. "Bosses pick people they will get on with and contracting often happens the same way. But I don't think the Commonwealth has done any substantial research to address that question."
The federal government has long resisted calls to establish an independent anti-corruption agency, citing a comparative lack of graft compared with state and territory bureaucracies.
This week, Australia fell outside the world's top-10 "clean" countries, according to Transparency International's corruption perception rankings.
The organisation said bribery allegations against the Reserve Bank's note-printing subsidiaries, as well as several high-profile ICAC inquiries in NSW, had helped to undermine Australia's image.
