Fleeting files_ now you see ’em, now you don’t

With the prospect of further sovereign support for the banks, courtesy of the continuing crisis in Europe, now is hardly the time for the government to be embarking on some frolic of disappearing documents.

But this is exactly what BusinessDay has busted the Reserve Bank and Treasury doing, purging information about the wholesale funding guarantee from the public database at the behest of the banks.

During the course of an investigation into the wholesale funding guarantee, we discovered large swathes of information relating to the use of the guarantee had been expunged from the website www.guaranteescheme.gov.au.

This culling of public data follows revelations here earlier in the year that the corporate regulator, the Australian Securities & Investments Commission, had been deleting evidence of the waivers it had provided to liquidators.

It seems the policy which underpins the new secrecy is as banal and indulgent as regulators and banks wanting to avoid embarrassment.

In any case, as pointed out by some tech-savvy readers, once information has been put on the internet it can usually be retrieved. But that is hardly the point. Why are publicly funded government bodies deleting public information from the public view in the first place?

Now the RBA and Treasury appear to have made an even greater mockery of the government’s ”commitment to transparency and accountability”. The funding guarantee scheme is an unprecedented concession for the banks – they are underpinned by the taxpayer and, thanks to sovereign largesse, cannot go bust.

Nonetheless, almost all detail relating to the billions of dollars in taxpayer-guaranteed funding has vanished from government websites. Only the details of current guarantees survive, at least in reasonably accessible form.

The presentation of the information that is available is so piecemeal and cumbersome as to be misleading. For a start, even searching for a current liability, there is the chore of having to open individual PDFs to extract quantum and interest rate particulars applying under each certificate.

Why is the information not available in a form which the public can conveniently analyse?

When requesting information relating to the funding guarantees, BusinessDay was met with this response from the RBA: ”The website lists all existing certificates. Details of expired liabilities are removed when requested by the relevant financial institution.”

When pressed as to why a private institution could demand public information relating to taxpayer support be taken off a public database, the central bank tweaked its message: ”The [RBA] publishes all current liabilities on the Guarantee Scheme website in accordance with our responsibilities under the Scheme Rules. If an issuer bank cancels a certificate, it is no longer a guaranteed liability and the certificate is removed from the website.”

Treasury had deflected the questions to the RBA after, incredibly, protesting that the information was ”confidential”. Neither would comment on who was responsible for the policy decision to censor the information.

This all sits very oddly with ”the government’s continuing commitment to transparency and accountability” highlighted at the end of six-monthly reports on the guarantee schemes and the original undertaking in 2008.

We can only surmise that both the government and the banks are trying to pretend there was never any corporate welfare in the first place. For the banks’ part, it is harder to justify $10 million executive salaries for running a taxpayer-guaranteed institution.

And for the government’s part, the censorship can only be put down to an obsequious backpedalling on previous commitments in order to appease the powerful banks.

In trying to rationalise its role in the purge, a Treasury spokesman said: ”Further data on liabilities issued under the Scheme by individual participating institutions is not provided on the Guarantee Scheme website for reasons of confidentiality.”

How mysterious, it wasn’t confidential before.