Australia: PwC Partners on Leave After Leak

Facts

• The Australian division of accounting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) has put nine partners on leave after the revelation that confidential tax reform plans had been shared internally and was later used to market tax planning strategies to global customers.¹
• Internal documents showed that former partner Peter Collins, while advising the Australian government on anti-tax avoidance reforms, had shared advance news of the legislation with PwC employees, with this information later being sold to clients to help circumvent the new laws.²
• The scandal spurred the resignation earlier this month of chief executive Tom Seymour and is now the subject of a criminal investigation into "alleged misuse of confidential government information."³
• Acting CEO Kristin Stubbins apologized for the scandal in an open letter, faulting a "failure of leadership and governance" and promising to keep government contracts separate from other parts of the firm.⁴
• Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has called for "proper transparency" in the matter, as PwC conducts an internal investigation. Some politicians are calling for all relevant documents to be released unredacted, while PwC claims the "vast majority of the recipients" were uninvolved with the leak.⁵
• PwC has $255M worth of contracts with the Australian government. Senate hearings involving Treasury and Tax Practitioners Board officials are set for this week as the internal and criminal investigations continue.⁵

Sources: ¹BNN, ²Associated Press, ³Al Jazeera, ⁴Reuters, and ⁵Guardian.

Narratives

• Left narrative, as provided by Guardian. The Australian government has grown too cozy with the major accounting firms — outsourcing government works to them in the name of privatization. With this serious breach of trust, Australia has reaped what they've sown. Such a conflict of interest should have been obvious, and we can only hope justice will be served. The interests of a private consulting firm are not aligned with the interests of the government, and important information needs to remain as a public good.
• Right narrative, as provided by Australian Financial Review. The world's massive consulting firms are often the only ones sophisticated enough to handle complicated government audits, and we should not let one incident, led by a rouge incident, allow us to discount their value. PwC has made an egregious violation of ethics and maybe even the law, but we should not let it feed into false narratives of widespread corporate tax evasion. Public-private partnerships are a vital part of today's economy.