Report Finds More Aussie Gov't Workers Misusing Internet

destinyland writes "A new report to Australia's parliament announces a 54% increase in government workers misusing the internet. In fiscal year 2010, 313 different federal workers came under investigation for improper use of e-mail or the internet, up from just 202 in the previous year. The report — available online as a PDF file — also discovered that nearly half the investigated workers were in the Australian Tax Office, according to an Australian technology blog. 'Maybe it's just a case of particularly boring work making such distractions more attractive,' they suggest, since the report blames most of the discovered cases on one-time incidents of poor judgment."

nothing to do with boring work or distractions

[bloodhawk]

The reason the ATO is so high on the list has nothing to do with behaviour of its staff (at least there behaviour is no worse than any other departments staff) and everything to do with how strictly they enforce the rules. As someone that works with many of the agencies in Aus the enforcement ranges from ATO's strict handling of the issue to many other departments that do nothing at all or hand out warning for all but the worst breaches, hell I worked at one that specifically told me to disable logging as if they logged the traffic they would have to do something about it and they didn't have the policy's in place to handle the legal issues that would arise at the time.

Re:Oh no.

[Anonymous Coward]

Just for the sake of clarity. The Australian Government has not actually made any laws about the Internet. They've just talked about it.