"There was a paper mountain of 1600 as yet determined applications,"said Ms Connor, who came on board as Manager, Titles Operations, during a massive restructure.

"They had 1600 matters that just hadn't been looked at, in cardboard boxes. Nothing was electronically recorded."

Coming from 20 years in local government, where everything was electronically recorded, as required under the Records Management Act, she was "horrified", she said.

"Even a post-it note is a record. It gets scanned. They had an electronic management system. They just didn't use it."

Paper files, dealing with billions of dollars worth of royalties, and bank guarantees, were sometimes left sitting in manila folders on someone's desk.

The senior members of staff who did know how to use the electronic system jumped in and out of working as mining agents, representing mining companies, then working for the department, and going back again, Ms Connor said.

"Some staff would jump into the dealings on screen of another person's case file and make changes according to what mining agents, former senior members of staff, told them to do."

It led to "land banking", she said, a practise where staff agreed to put an assessment lease on hold, effectively stopping the clock on the royalties or fees which a mining company would ordinarily have to pay, while also keeping that land out of competitors' reach.

"It's completely against the objectives of the act, but that's what these guys would do," she said.

"There were particular officers and particular mining agents who had a very close relationship. There was that whole industry capture issue going on."

People who spoke up found themselves being shown the door, Ms Connor said, including herself, in May, 2018.

"No one's actually looked at those public interest disclosures," she said.

And many of the staff that were named in the those disclosures are either still working, awesome of them as senior public servants.

"I've thought about it for five years," she said

"The only way that they're gonna fix the accidental corruption, as well as the intentional corruption, is for the whole thing to go back to Sydney.

"There's no supervision in Maitland. There is absolutely none. So, you know, staff are sitting there saying, 'this is how we did this for 20 years, and we're gonna keep going on this way for 20 years ... this is just how we work'.

"Nobody has any oversight of all of that."

In Sydney, the operation could access appropriately qualified, senior staff who understood the relevant legislation, with the potential for conflicts of interest inherent in a very small mining community, she said..

"They admit it in the (Ombudsman's) report ... they're living in a community where everyone's income is derived from mining. And it's a very, very small community."

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