The federal government failed to reveal a letter from the Sydney siege gunman had not been sent to a high-level review until three days after the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet said it had not received it.
Foreign Minister Julie Bishop told the parliament on June 4 the letter from Man Haron Monis to Attorney-General George Brandis in October 2014 had not been sent to the joint NSW-federal review because of an "administrative error".
That was despite staff at the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet informing their colleagues at the Attorney-General's department at 12.15pm on June 1 that they had not received the letter via email.
Deputy secretary Tony Sheehan defended the time it took to formally tell Senator Brandis and for his colleague Katherine Jones to correct her record to a Senate hearing four days later.
"The secretary wanted to be very thorough in the way that this work was done and that if there needed to be a correction to the Hansard that it be an absolutely certain correction and we had done our work properly," he told senators on Tuesday night.
Ms Jones had told a previous estimates hearing the letter was sent, before she realised her possible mistake at a lunch with a colleague.
Labor senator Jacinta Collins criticised the time delay.
Why didn't a correction occur on June 1, rather than a "fishing exercise to delay the process until after four question times so that the government could avoid scrutiny on this issue", she posed.
The committee was told last Friday the letter was not sent because someone did not realise it was on tab two of a spreadsheet.
Also on the tab and not forwarded were two letters from Monis to other politicians, another to a government agency and one to a private citizen.
The Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet's acting associate secretary, Allan McKinnon, said documents for the review were stored in a four-drawer filing cabinet and the letter was not there when they looked.
Mr McKinnon described the letter as "stock-standard" from Monis, following more than 20 years of letter writing.
The associate secretary reiterated the view of the department's secretary Michael Thawley that it would not have made a difference to the review.
There was nothing at all special about it or the use of "Caliph", he told senators.
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