Tech companies vying for government work are lavishing thousands of gifts, offers of hospitality and other gratuities on public servants, and one company is behind almost all of them.
Public servants were offered more than 3600 gifts or benefits over a 12-month period, with tech giant ServiceNow far and away the most generous when it came to offers, accounting for about 94 per cent of the total estimated value of all gifts and benefits offered across the federal government.
The company logged 3153 individual offers primarily driven by automated bulk distribution lists and large conference invitations.
Despite the volume of vendor approaches, a whole-of-government integrity audit by the Digital Transformation Agency (DTA) revealed that public servants knocked back most of them.
Knowing that oversight bodies were tracking and cross-matching vendor logs in real time drove a clear cultural shift towards declining vendor hospitality.
Across the pilot period between April 2025 and March 2026, tech suppliers logged 3662 total offers to the public service and senior executive service officers, but staff rejected 3123 of them and accepted just 539.
When filtered strictly to higher-value items exceeding the standard $100 public disclosure threshold, scrutiny proved even higher, with officials accepting only 188 offers worth a combined $29,151 and outright declining 2897.
Offers ranged from corporate meals to high-end entertainment, but public servants turned down thousands of event invitations.
The audit detailed which large spending entities recorded the highest number of accepted high-value perks from the nine vendors in scope.
The Defence department recorded the highest totals, with staff accepting 33 gifts valued at an estimated $6300, followed by Services Australia with 24 accepted gifts valued at $3316.
The Australian Taxation Office and the Home Affairs department recorded 17 and 16 accepted offers respectively, and both the Finance department and the Industry department accepted nine.
Out of ServiceNow's 3153 recorded offers, public servants declined 3005 and accepted 148.
The DTA noted that accepted items across all nine vendors, which also included AWS, Microsoft, IBM and SAP, were almost exclusively professional in nature, such as conference passes, specialised technical training and industry networking sessions connected to legitimate government operations.
Outright inappropriate offers, such as sporting match tickets, were universally declined.
Even though the investigation cleared officials of systemic misconduct and yielded no evidence warranting official referrals for formal anti-corruption investigations, it revealed inconsistent record-keeping in how individual departments track corporate perks.
The findings have prompted an immediate tightening of public service transparency rules, with analysts highlighting that real-time prospective monitoring actively forced both buyers and sellers to exercise far greater caution.
The trial was originally established in response to a recommendation from the joint committee on public accounts and audit, which investigated procurement practices at Services Australia and the National Disability Insurance Agency.
The DTA compiled data from the nine key information and communications technology sellers and cross-matched their reported logs against the published registers of 113 Commonwealth entities to establish the new baseline.
