Inquiry into state local health districts’ use of consultants to begin after firm revealed to have misuse of confidential information
Incredulous claims from PwC personnel
As a former tax director in PwC’s Brisbane office, I find it incredulous that both PwC personnel and clients involved in the “Peter Collins confidentially breach” saga are claiming they had no knowledge the information used was confidential.
From a PwC perspective, if a colleague comes to you with an idea that will save your clients tens of millions of dollars, first thing is you look at the relevant legislation. If it relates to non-existent legislation, you start asking some pretty specific questions.
Any tax practitioners, particularly those in the big four, would want to know where the “not publicly available” information came from. It’s inconceivable that multiple partners, directors and other team members didn’t know that the information had come from a government source, and that any such source was confidential.
Likewise, no CFO of a multinational company is going to sign off on parting with $500,000 to get around legislation that doesn’t exist, unless they know that the legislation they’re trying to circumvent is actually going to be enacted. Just stating what I think is obvious.
Tracey Murray Brisbane, Qld
“Does Economics Do More Harm than Good?”
In a new book, George DeMartino offers some novel and pointed criticisms of economics, focusing on societal damage.
Capitalists hate capitalism Cory Doctorow, Pluralistic
How The Economist reached 2.7 mln subscribers with its LinkedIn newsletter Plus: a new list of journalists on TikTok : How The Economist built one of its most successful newsletters on LinkedIn. For this issue, I spoke with Aaron Coultate, head of newsletters at The Economist. Aaron is responsible for a rich portfolio of newsletters, but there is one I was particularly interested in. One year ago, he worked on the launch of The Economist Week Ahead, the first LinkedIn newsletter published by the London-based paper. The experiment was a big hit and is now the third most-read title at The Economist, with 2.7 million subscribers.
FZ: How many newsletters are you managing right now? AC: We have eleven subscriber-only newsletters and three free for all. Four, if you count our LinkedIn newsletter.
FZ: Why did you add a LinkedIn newsletter to your portfolio? AC: When LinkedIn added the functionality to create a newsletter on the platform, it was a no-brainer for us to launch one, given that The Economist has 13 million followers on LinkedIn. It made sense to tap into that community. We launched The Economist’s Week Ahead in July 2022, and there were a few key things that we wanted to try out with this newsletter…”
