CITATION: Dr Nikola Stepanov

Dr Nikola Stepanov, Queensland Integrity Commissioner, made disclosures tending to show that the Office of the Integrity Commissioner may have been receiving interference from the Public Service Commission.

Her disclosures were supported by claims describing the practices of under-resourcing of her Office, and of interfering with their operation by means that may include the deletion of public records and the seizure of data storage devices.

These disclosures advance the claims of three decades of whistleblowers in Queensland who have alleged that integrity bodies did not have the resources to investigate fairly, thoroughly and properly the wrongdoing brought to Queensland’s integrity bodies – the Ombudsman, the Crime & Corruption Commission, the Legal Services Commission, for example.

Queensland’s integrity bodies have had to send the whistleblowers’ disclosures back to the alleged wrongdoers or to their representative organisations to ‘investigate’. Disposal and / or destruction of documents and computers have been a most common claim that has accompanied those self-serving self-investigations.

With Dr Stepanov’s disclosures, the first claims of such manipulations of integrity processes are now coming from an Integrity body itself.