Former Corruption and Crime Commissioner employee charged with corruption over illicit affair with informant

A senior Corruption and Crime Commissioner officer who was in charge of its human sources has been charged with corruption after she struck up an intimate relationship with an informant. The 42-year-old woman was a long-term employee of the commission and was at the time acting as a “human source handler”. Police say while in this role, the woman allegedly developed an “inappropriate intimate relationship” with a prisoner, otherwise known as a “registered human source”, over an “extended period”. It is alleged the woman “engaged in deceitful conduct” to hide the relationship from the CCC so she could continue “clandestine meetings” with her lover. That allegedly included creating a pseudonym to register herself with the prison as a legal contact for the inmate. Police allege that allowed the woman to maintain the secret relationship and “secure extended unmonitored and unrecorded contact” with the prisoner. She is no longer employed by the CCC and is due before Perth Magistrates Court on April 11. The corruption charge comes just over a year after a bombshell report was tabled in Parliament detailing the illicit relationship, which went undetected for more than three years. The report said the woman, referred to only as “LC”, had engaged in “repeated and wilful breaches of the Commission’s policies, procedures, and Code of Conduct”. She had thousands of personal interactions with the prisoner, including 7413 phone calls and 1905 audio messages from October 2018 to March 2023, many of which were unrelated to the work of the CCC. On at least three occasions, LC was found to have disclosed sensitive “official information” to her lover without permission. One of those breaches involved revealing the name and location of a whistleblower who had made a complaint to the CCC in which they expressly requested to remain anonymous. While the Parliamentary Inspector at the time concluded it was “a story of one officer who has gone rogue”, he said the Commission “must accept that failures within its systems” allowed LC’s deception to not only occur, but be “perpetrated over a prolonged period”. The CCC was forced to suspend its work with all informants pending investigation after the extended tryst was uncovered. An external review into how the illicit affair flew under the radar and into the CCC’s management of its misconduct risks more broadly was tabled in Parliament in November last year. It exposed “glaring deficiencies in the commission’s risk management systems and culture over many years”, including repeated “failures of leadership”. The report was scathing of CCC managers, saying they “ignored ‘red flags’” and “the inadequate monitoring of the officer was, at best, negligent”. The damning findings led to 10 recommendations to address commission-wide matters, as well as additional recommendations to address issues central to human source operations.