IBAC finds two senior Victorian public servants hid $285m COVID grant errors

The Independent Broad‑based Anti‑corruption Commission has concluded that two senior Victorian public servants attempted to hide a major error in the state’s COVID‑19 business grants program, an IBAC report released on October 15, 2026 found.

The watchdog says staff in the Department of Jobs, Precincts and Regions identified in November 2021 that over 9,000 businesses had backdated their GST registrations and thereby became ineligible for payments under the scheme, creating what the department estimated as up to $285 million in erroneous claims.

IBAC’s analysis determined that about $257 million was paid to businesses that did not meet eligibility rules, including roughly $108 million disbursed to businesses that reported no activity in the six months before the pandemic, the report says.

The commission found officials used a live GST database to check eligibility; IBAC said that system updated as businesses backdated registrations rather than reflecting the snapshot of registrations at the program’s announcement, which allowed ineligible claims to be processed.

The report describes internal reactions as officials realised the scale of the problem, including notes that the acting director of COVID‑19 grants policy reacted with alarm and later described being "astonished" at how many ineligible claims had "snuck through." IBAC said an item documenting the issue was removed from a departmental report at the request of a deputy secretary on November 30, 2021, and that false and misleading information was supplied to then‑minister Martin Pakula in November 2021.

IBAC also records that misleading information continued to circulate to ministers, saying such information reached Ben Carroll in 2022 after he became the responsible minister. The commission states that whistleblowers brought the problem to its attention, prompting the formal investigation and public report.

To date, recipients who wrongly received grants have repaid about $8 million to the state government, the report says.

The commission’s findings focus on procedural failures within the department — the choice to rely on a live GST feed rather than a static eligibility dataset, the internal deletion of a report item, and the creation and dissemination of misleading material to ministers.

The report names specific monetary totals and internal dates, and attributes the cover‑up actions to two senior public servants, while documenting the departmental processes that allowed ineligible payments.

The Sydney Morning Herald, The Guardian and ABC News ran accounts of IBAC’s findings that mirror the commission’s published totals and descriptions, and their headlines flagged the scale of the loss and the allegation that officials sought to conceal it.

The IBAC report supplies the primary documentary record for those assertions and records repayments and internal communications as described above.