Marian Banaś, the former president of Poland’s Supreme Audit Office, warned that Polish intelligence services operate with insufficient oversight in September.
His comments preceded a pedophilia scandal involving the secret services. Colonel Paweł Woźniak, a longtime officer and former deputy head of the Intelligence Agency under General Maciej Hunia, was convicted of pedophilia and sentenced to three years and six months in prison in late September.
Banaś suggested that the lack of proper oversight within the intelligence services may have contributed to such abuses.
“It’s a state within a state,” Banaś said in September.
Banaś believes that the Polish Sejm passing a law extending the powers of the Supreme Audit Office (Polish: Najwyższa Izba Kontroli, NIK) to allow the oversight of the special services by the Supreme Audit Office might change the situation for the better.
When asked about the developments in the matter during a recent radio interview with RMF FM, Banaś said that the proposed draft law has been stuck in the Polish Sejm for over a year.
“Theoretically, there are special investigative committees that exercise the scrutiny function of the Sejm, but there’s no actual oversight of the special services,” Banaś said.
“What’s more, the chiefs of the Foreign Intelligence Agency (Polish: Agencja Wywiadu) and the Central Anti-Corruption Bureau (Polish: Centralne Biuro Antykorupcyjne, CBA) decide what intelligence they want to share with the Polish prime minister and the Polish president and what information they wish to withhold from the top Polish elected officials,” he added.
Banaś said that such a state of affairs is unacceptable in a democratic country.
“There can be no institution in a democratic country that isn’t accountable to the Polish Sejm, the prime minister or the president,” he added.
The Pegasus scandal
The Polish secret services are also implicated in the Pegasus scandal.
On Sept. 30, 2025, former Polish Justice Minister Zbigniew Ziobro was forcibly brought by police from a plane at Warsaw’s Chopin Airport to testify before a parliamentary commission investigating the use of Pegasus spyware by the former Law and Justice (PiS) government.
Pegasus is a spyware developed by Israel’s NSO Group that can secretly hack smartphones to access messages, calls and data. In 2024, the Polish government acknowledged that around 600 Polish citizens were targeted with the Pegasus software between 2017 and 2022.
Ziobro said that those deemed to pose a threat to the Polish state must be investigated and monitored by all means necessary.
Ziobro confirmed that he had played a key role in the purchase of Pegasus and said he was “proud” of that fact, given that it was used to tackle crime.
However, Ziobro said he is unfamiliar with the technicalities of Pegasus, noting that it is a job for the Polish secret services.
Banaś’s assertion of a lack of oversight over the secret service, in turn, suggests that it is unclear if Polish citizens are still being illegally spied on.