Senate audit leak wasn’t my office, says auditor-general
Michael Ferguson says security firm investigated if staff could have leaked audit in early June 2015.

thestar.com
May 17, 2016

The auditor general says a leak of his high-profile review of Senate spending is unlikely to have come from his office, pointing the finger back at the Senate as the source of the unauthorized release.

Michael Ferguson says his office hired an outside security firm to investigate his staff to see if any of them could have leaked the audit to journalists ahead of its public release in early June 2015.

Ferguson tells senators investigating the source of the leak that he is confident any information in the audit didn’t come from his people, but says he can’t be 100 per cent sure.

It was that possibility that senators on the Senate’s rules committee locked on to as they used the morning meeting to blame Ferguson’s office as the source of the leak.

This investigation is the second time in as many years that the Senate has looked into the leak of Ferguson’s report, an event that senators argue violated their parliamentary privilege and the right to see the document before the public.

In some cases, senators say they learned the details of the audit from reading media reports.