The consultancy firm PwC will name all staff involved in the tax scandal shortly after it completes an internal investigation.
“This is a comprehensive, detailed investigation and as you can appreciate, we need to get it right,” acting PwC chief executive, Kristin Stubbins, told a parliamentary inquiry on Monday.
“When the investigation is complete, which it will be shortly, we will be naming all those people who did anything wrong and there will be appropriate accountability.”
Meanwhile, the firm has been accused of trying to “phoenix” its staff back into business with state and federal governments, with departments urged to view the creation of a new company with scepticism.
PwC has announced plans to divest itself of all government work in Australia by spinning off a new company, as part of a $1 buyout by private equity investor Allegro Funds.
The chair of PwC’s governance board, Justin Carroll, said the divestment was an “extremely difficult decision” that was necessary to protect jobs and regain trust after a confidentiality scandal damaged the firm’s reputation and revenue.
But Labor senator Deborah O’Neil questioned the $1 divestment and compared it to phoenixing – the act of liquidating a struggling business before a new company is created with the same staff and management.
“[PwC has been] very, very slow with very resistant responses to public inquiries and yet we have this unseemly haste, with a profit-driven motive, to try and phoenix itself back into some sort of connection with the government,” O’Neil told the ABC.
“I am very concerned at this point of time that the motivations of those at PwC remain self-centred and not about service.”
News of the plan emerged last week when it was reported that 130 PwC Australia partners and 1,750 staff would move to a new company that had been codenamed “Bell”.
O’Neil said it was not clear whether PwC staff who were aware of the misuse of confidential tax information would be transferred to the new company.
“Let’s face it, people who have been on the partner track for most of their life have been [indoctrinated] into the ways of PwC, which have now been revealed to the Australian people as contemptuous,” O’Neil said.
“There is a very big bridge between where PwC currently is and any modicum of trust that a government might have with services provided to them by a company still dominated by a majority of PwC staff.”
PwC’s acting chief executive, Kristin Stubbins, told a NSW parliamentary inquiry that no one involved in the confidentiality scandal would be transferred to the new company.
“We will make sure that all staff and partners included in that transaction have not done the wrong thing,” Stubbins said. “Anyone who has done the wrong thing, when we complete our investigation, will be announced and those people will not be going across.”
Stubbins said the firm would not profit from the divestment and any new company would not be based alongside existing PwC businesses.
Government contracts provide about 20% of PwC’s revenue but Carroll said the divestment would “ensure stability for the rest of PwC’s clients in other parts of the business”.
State and federal departments of finance both said they would be waiting to assess the impact of the proposed restructure.
The Australian Department of Finance said it would “carefully consider the implications of these changes for existing and future contracting arrangements”.
Greens senator Barbara Pocock, who sits on a parliamentary committee examining PwC’s conduct with O’Neil, said government departments should continue to view the firm cautiously.
“We need more than verbal assurances,” Pocock told the ABC. “The government needs to be confident that the practices, the protocols and the leadership really understand what government expect from them.
“We have a fair distance to travel with some very significant procedures under way through the Australian federal police and a range of inquiries and a mere change in structure and leadership doesn’t deliver what is really needed here.”
The New South Wales minister for finance, Courtney Houssos, said the state government would be assessing the integrity of the divested business as part of a broader promise to combat waste and ineffectiveness in consultancy hires.
PwC has been contacted for a response.
