Palestinians 4, PWC zero
Remember how PWC (Price Waterhouse) boycotted the last Writer’s Week because they had some Palestinian writers speaking?
Now PWC is in deep, deep, deep shit.
I wrote about the accountant-consultant corruption issue back in 2019 in Opinion Online, ‘Auditors without Border’, when InDaily in Adelaide was too chicken shit to publish it.
In a combination of breathtaking arrogance and dazzling ineptitude, the Australian arm of global accounting giant PwC has managed to turn a possible crime into a national crisis and then allowed it to evolve into a catastrophe.
At no stage during the past eight years has anyone from PWC voluntarily fronted the public to explain how and why confidential federal government information was exploited for profit.
Instead, its leaders have repeatedly chosen to hide, first behind the veil of client confidentiality and later behind an impenetrable corporate wall and an army of spin doctors.
If ever evidence was needed of the disconnect between the standards employed by the firm’s senior management and what is expected by society, it is front and centre in its own defence.
Consider this. Peter Collins, the former PwC tax head at the centre of the scandal, having signed three confidentiality agreements with the federal government between 2013 and 2018, felt comfortable enough to widely circulate what he knew with others in the firm.
Around 63 partners and senior managers were linked into a long email trail about the strategy then-treasurer Joe Hockey was about to employ to ensure global technology giants paid their fair share of tax.
The emails then reveal the firm’s plans to market schemes to those very companies on how best to avoid the new tax arrangements.
An email trail! In writing.
Up there for thinking.