Throughout this whole sorry tale it is interesting that the one document that demonstrates the inadequacies of both the ATSB "investigation" and the requlator's past and present deficiencies was the special audit of Pelair that ran concurrently with the investigation
FS what is more interesting is that although, as you say, the audit and investigation ran concurrently there was no swapping of information between the two teams. The fact that the ATSB have only been given a copy of the SAR in July this year over 2.5yrs after the report was first produced stinks of a major cover up.
However it can be explained because the ATSB and CASA were running a parallel investigation (as per the MOU) and therefore the ATSB relied on the CASA investigative team (ALIU) to give a summary of the findings of the Special Audit.
The bigger question that needs to be asked is if the Special Audit Team had the bases covered for any possible enforcement action to do with the company management, pilots etc..etc why then deploy an investigative team at all?
Although the accident had the potential to be very serious with possibly up to six fatalities the potential violations would seem to be encompassed by the remit of the special audit team.
Supposedly the investigative team carry out accident investigations when there may potentially be signs of breaches of the Act that could lead to criminal or administrative charges. So the investigators are essentially compiling a report that could end up being the basis of a brief of evidence.
However if you read the CAIR 09/3 it doesn't draw on any evidence chain, document exhibits, use any forensic analysis (especially as they refused to recover the CVR/FDR), basically that report reads like a 'bare bones' version of the ATSB Final report except it was produced over two years before!
Here's a link to the CAIR 09/3 that has been extracted and copied from Attachment 4 of the FF submission (hopefully it'll work as I'm new to zippyshare):
Zippyshare.com - CASA investigation report.pdf