CANBERRA, Nov. 27 (Xinhua) -- More than 4, 000 Australian public servants believed they had witnessed corruption in the last year.
A report released by the Australian Public Service Commission (APSC) on Tuesday revealed that 4,395 federal public servants said they saw corrupt behaviours at work in a single year.
However, the APSC investigated only 78 public servants for corrupt behaviour in the timeframe in question, with 72 breaches confirmed.
Cronyism and nepotism were the most common forms of reported corruption followed by theft, credit card misuse and fraudulent medical certificates.
"Corruption cases represent a very small proportion of the already small numbers (569) of employees investigated for breaches of the code of conduct," the report said.
"The data represents employee perceptions and is not evidence of actual corruption."
The report comes as Prime Minister Scott Morrison faces intense pressure from the opposition Australian Labor Party (ALP) and independent Members of Parliament (MPs) to establish a national anti-corruption watchdog.
Morrison on Monday said he would support the body for the first time but said it would be his governing Liberal- National party (LNP) that decided what form it would take.
In order to establish his own version of the body, however, Morrison would need the support of either the ALP or the independent MPs, with his LNP holding only 75 of 150 seats in the lower house of the Australian Parliament, the House of Representatives, and thus unable to pass legislation of it is own volition.
The equation is even more difficult in the upper house, the Senate, where the LNP holds only 31 of 76 seats.
