The Senate has quickly handed down its report into the PwC scandal and it pulls few punches, causing one governance expert to declare, “The findings are game over for PwC”. What’s the scam?
The scam is PwC was confidentially advising the Government on tax reforms and secretly leaked that information to its multinational tax avoiding clients to make a profit.
“A long-standing, multi-year strategy to conceal, diminish in severity, deceive, obfuscate, lie, steal, monetise state secrets, and abuse legal privilege, to the point where the Inquiry finds “[PwC’s as a whole] has lost the capacity to act honestly. In fact, it is clear now that its senior leadership does not recognise basic ethical and legal principles,” is the way Professor Andy Schmulow described it on LinkedIn.
It is surely a breathtaking scandal, a betrayal of Australian taxpayers on an unprecedented scale, and a good job by the Senate investigating it, but PwC has so infiltrated governments at the highest level that the firm likely to let it blow over and allow “business as usual” to prevail. There is no effective regulator to count on. The only solution for Big 4 conflicts of interest is to bust up them up along consulting, audit and tax lines. And that is unlikely to happen until a few scandals down the road.
The problem with PWC and the Big 4 – treason is the business model
Anatomy of a Cover-Up: whistleblower warned PwC and Lendlease of $1b tax scam
Michael West established Michael West Media in 2016 to focus on journalism of high public interest, particularly the rising power of corporations over democracy. West was formerly a journalist and editor with Fairfax newspapers, a columnist for News Corp and even, once, a stockbroker.