Queensland’s Audit Office has released a report on corruption in Local Government, and revealed that about half the state’s corruption is limited to a single council.

The council has not been publically named as part of a policy to avoid vexatious mudslinging before anything is proven, but the findings have been referred to the state’s corruption watchdog.

The auditor’s report (accessible here in PDF form) said the local government sector “experiences a significant level of fraudulent and corrupt activity” but it is hard to accurately quantify the true level of fraud, because of councils often have poor record keeping practices, and there “are inconsistencies in how, and to which authorities, fraud matters must be reported.”

The report found that the most common types of council fraud were misappropriation of council assets, theft, and “corruption by employees who use their position’s authority or their access to information for personal benefit.”

The review found there were 5510 alleged frauds in Queensland’s 77 councils in the five years from July 2009 to June 2014, an average of 1002 alleged incidents a year.

But the Queensland Audit Office said the fraud statistics provided by councils could be misleading, given that “almost two-thirds of councils surveyed (63 per cent) claimed to have had no confirmed cases of fraud over the past five-years.”

“This is inconsistent with global research undertaken in 2014 which identified 41 per cent of government organisations experienced at least one instance of economic crime, including fraud, in the past two years,” the Audit Office said.

“Councils did not provide us with a fraud loss value for 58 per cent of their fraud cases; and 44 per cent of councils indicated they do not have a system to manage their fraud information.”

Alarmingly, the Queensland Audit Office warned that actually spotting corruption in councils is getting more and more difficult, especially when it comes to the way that council deals are awarded.

In the case of the one particularly dodgy local government, the Audit Office says its detailed data analytics showed several potential indicators of extensive fraud and corruption at the council in question.

“Based on fraud indicators, we assessed the potential for further fraud and corruption at this council and formed a view that corrupt conduct may have occurred. In accordance with section 38 of the Crime and Corruption Act 2001, we referred our findings to the Crime and Corruption Commission,” the Audit report said.

The auditors recommended that the state’s Department of Infrastructure, Local Government and Planning bring in reforms to force councils to officially report losses stemming from fraud, and keep written records of allegations as well.