With friends like PwC, who needs enemies? Kristin Stubbins

With friends like PwC, who needs enemies? 

Kristin Stubbins does not seem assured her former employer necessarily has her best interests at heart.  Max MasonSenior reporter

At the rate PwC Australia partners and alumni are throwing each other under the bus, we’re going to need a new depot just outside the Australian parliament.

Quietly taking precautions, it appears, is former acting PwC Australia chief executive Kristin Stubbins, who does not seem assured her former employer necessarily has her best interests at heart. At least, that’s what we’re taking out of the fact that she’s hired her own lawyers.

While common in some types of civil proceedings, it certainly isn’t normal in defamation proceedings.

PwC Australia and Stubbins are the subject of defamation and breach of contract proceedings brought by former partner Richard Gregg.

Gregg, who successfully sued the firm last year for failing to follow proper process in its attempt to sack him, alleges that PwC and Stubbins’ statements in the fallout of the tax scandal severely damaged his reputation by incorrectly linking him to the improper sharing of confidential government tax information.

These statements include open letters penned by Stubbins that were posted on PwC’s website and widely published across the media.

Stubbins was elevated to acting PwC Australia chief executive in mid-May last year as part of the attempt to deal with the tax leaks scandal. She was ousted just a few months later when PwC International took control and installed two-wage sensation Kevin Burrowes.

To defend against Gregg, PwC has tapped Corrs Chambers Westgarth to defend it in what seems like a spectacular own goal.

PwC actually tried to oust Gregg over earlier misconduct that had nothing to do with the tax leaks case and which he’d already been disciplined for. After a court ruled his sacking improper, Gregg ended up resigning of his own accord. He launched defamation action in May this year.

It’s this action in which Stubbins is no longer taking PwC’s legal advice. She’s tapped Clayton Utz instead.

Stubbins was PwC’s most senior auditor before being roped in to steer the ship after Tom Seymour’s abrupt departure. When she was informed by PwC global chairman Bob Moritz that she was being replaced by Burrowes because of an international “brand crisis” created by the tax leaks scandal, she wasn’t surprised, just disappointed. She’s recently started a new consultancy.

If Gregg is successful, it is likely Stubbins will be indemnified by PwC, given she was acting on behalf of the firm. PwC will probably be on the hook for her legal costs in any case.

PwC Australia chief risk and ethics leader Jan McCahey revealed to the joint committee last Friday that it is a standard term in the partnership agreement for legal costs incurred in connection with one’s PwC role to be covered by the firm, should the partner seek this.

PwC has been shelling out for legal matters for most of the year. It was ordered to pay $250,000, plus interest, for Gregg’s legal costs in the case to stop it from firing him. It has also settled, on unknown terms, with another partner, Neil Fuller, who was pushed out after the tax leaks scandal.

With a potentially more substantial defamation claim from Gregg, PwC is unlikely to fight Stubbins’ legal fees in the manner we’ve grown used to from watching Network Ten’s battles with Lisa Wilkinson. But just in case, we’ll keep the popcorn ready.

Max Mason covers insolvency, courts, regulation, financial crime, cybercrime and corporate wrongdoing. A Walkley Award winner, Max's journalism has also received awards from the National Press Club of Australia, the Kennedy Awards and Citibank. Message Max on Signal https://tinyurl.com/MaxMason Connect with Max on Twitter. Email Max at max.mason@afr.com

 

Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, July 27, 2024 – Privacy and cybersecurity issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, finance, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and wide ranging ways technology is used to compromise and diminish our privacy and online security, often without our situational awareness. 

Four highlights from this week: New Hack Threat: Thieves Take Over Your Phone Number; AT&T failed to test disastrous update that kicked all devices off network; How Russia-Linked Malware Cut Heat to 600 Ukrainian Buildings in Deep Winter; and Ransomware attack closes LA County Superior Court buildings.

Public Work is a search engine [users may search and then download images] for public domain content. Explore 100,000+ copyright-free images from The MET, New York Public Library, and other sources.”

• What’s Public Domain?

To preserve their work and drafts of history journalists take archiving into their own hands

NiemanLabs – From loading up the Wayback Machine to meticulous AirTables to 72 hours of scraping, journalists are doing whatever they can to keep their clips when websites go dark: “When news sites shut down, those sites’ owners often don’t prioritize the preservation of the content. MTV pulled down MTV News in June. After Deadspin was sold, many of its archives temporarily disappeared. This week, Flaming Hydra reported that The Awl’s archivesare gone. 

And those examples are just from the past couple of months; in 2021, the authors of a Reynolds Journalism Institute report found that just 7 out of 24 newsrooms they interviewed were fully preserving their news content. “It’s really kind of a web of responsibility in terms of creating an accurate record,” Talya Cooper, a research curation librarian at NYU and The Intercept’s former archivist, told me. “When you hear about something being shut down, it’s not just ‘Wow, all of this content is being lost.’ It’s also all of the content that is derived from this content — a key bedrock of evidence that could be used to verify a claim, or bolster someone’s career, or any number of things.”

 AI further complicates matters — what happens when sites are used to feed ChatGPT, then go offline? “What happens when that information is baked into large language models and the source of that information is not live on the web anymore?” Cooper wondered. “It’s kind of mind-boggling to think about, but it is reality for a lot of websites that have been crawled and had their content put into the blender of large language models. How will it be possible, in the future, to trace back some of the claims that will be made by ChatGPT if the content is no longer alive?” When news sites’ archives disappear, readers aren’t the only ones who lose out — there are all kinds of personal and professional challenges for journalists, too. 

They’re left to archive their work on their own, so that they have clips to show the next job. Web pages, photographs, and text stories are easier to save than audio files, interactives, and other types of digital journalism; to preserve those, journalists often have to get creative. Paid personal archiving services are available, but “it’s not necessarily appealing when you’re just trying to look for a way to save something that was previously online for free,” one journalist told me…”