CHILD protection whistleblowers have accused Territory Families of writing off cases where children remained unsafe amid pressure to achieve budgetary or performance goals.

It follows a blitz ordered early last year to close more than 500 outstanding child protection cases.

Territory Families refused requests for interviews but in a statement a spokeswoman denied most of the allegations made in a complaint by a child protection case manager to the Office of the Commissioner for Public Disclosures, saying only “administrative cases” had been closed and that this had been signed off by an experienced senior child protection professional.

Families Minister Dale Wakefield avoided directly answering questions about whether cases had been closed where it could not be guaranteed that a child was safe, and would only say that “most” cases were “administrative in nature”.

Other senior staff members, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said methods that were deemed “not best practice” had been used to close cases for almost a decade and were still being used today.

A complaint sent to the Office of the Commissioner for Public Disclosure last year included allegations that “backlog” cases were being closed without sighting the children or conducting an investigation.

Another whistleblower said practices varied across different regions with the Southern Region — which takes in Alice Springs and the Barkly district, where two toddlers have been raped in the past month — long known for its “unconventional practices”.

“The call would be made to Central Intake, the notification made, it would screen in, it would be allocated to the region to investigate, the region would receive the information and almost do a second assessment and determine whether it really needed an investigation or not,” the whistleblower said about practices that had occurred in the past.

“And if they thought that it wasn’t a priority they would make a couple of phone calls to check, it might have been a phone call to the health clinic or a phone call to the school to check on the child and if no further information was received they’d simply close it down without doing an investigation.”

The whistleblowers’ accusations are in line with findings made by child protection expert Jay Tolhurst and former NT Children’s Commissioner Howard Bath in various reports handed down in 2009 and 2010.

Families Minister Dale Wakefield said there had been a significant increase in the number of notifications being made to the Central Intake Team. But she did not directly answer questions about whether she could guarantee no cases were being closed without a proper investigation where children may have been left in an unsafe environment.