Organisations covered
These guidelines apply to all organisations referred to in section 17(2) of the Public Service Act 2020, excluding school boards. This includes:
- Public service departments
- Departmental agencies
- Interdepartmental executive boards and ventures[1]
- Crown agents
- Crown entities (excluding tertiary education institutions, and Crown Research Institutes and their subsidiaries)
- companies named in Schedule 4A of the Public Finance Act 1989
- the Parliamentary Counsel Office
Timing for submission of reports
Organisations are required to provide a report on the outcomes of all employment investigations into alleged misconduct and serious misconduct by employees that have ceased or concluded during that financial year (from 1 July to 30 June). If an investigation is ongoing or the action that will be taken in response to an investigation has not yet been determined, this investigation should be included in the report for the following year.
Reports must be submitted after 30 June and before 1 October each year. Templates and specific instructions for submitting reports will be emailed to organisations in advance of reporting rounds.
As organisations may not have previously collected this information in a consistent format, the first organisational report (covering 1 July 2026 to 30 June 2027) is not required until after 30 June 2027.
Staff covered
For the purposes of reporting, ‘employees’ includes both permanent employees and fixed term employees. Contractors and volunteers are not included in the scope of reporting.
Where staff are seconded, the obligation to report rests with the organisation that undertook the investigation.
Alignment to section 94A notification requirements
In addition to the general reporting requirements outlined in this guidance, the Public Service Act 2020 has also been amended to introduce a requirement for public service department chief executives and boards of interdepartmental ventures to notify the Public Service Commissioner before commencing an investigation into allegations of misconduct or serious misconduct by a senior public service employee (see section 94A). This requirement only applies to public service departments and only to investigations into senior public service employees, defined as direct reports to the chief executive or interdepartmental board. Separate guidance for this requirement can be accessed on the Commission’s website.
Investigations into senior public service employees that have been notified to the Public Service Commissioner under section 94A must be included in an organisation’s total investigation numbers when 94B reports are submitted at the end of the financial year, once the investigation has concluded or ceased.
[1] If all staff supporting an interdepartmental executive board are covered in the report of the board’s servicing department, no separate report is required