Loose lips and sinking ships at PwC
PWC Tax Scandal The accounting firm’s reputation for being a bona fide keeper of high-level confidences has taken another hit, with fresh secrets spilled.
Well, it's happened again -the blabbing -- except this time it's not PwC responsible for being loose-lipped but actually Treasury's people who were silly enough to give away classified information.
And they're angry about it too - angry enough to have demanded answers from PwC. Because it wasn't their fault, see? It was PwC's fault! And you can imagine that this incredible embarrassment is doing nothing to help release PwC from the deepfreeze of reputational pariahdom, to once again be regarded as a bonafide keeper of highlevel confidences.
This incident unfolded in October when someone within Treasury's Market Conduct division, led by Assistant Secretary Tom Dickson, took a call from PwC's newly-minted head of government affairs, Jesse Krncevic.
Krncevic's role immediately prior to PwC was at the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, where he was head of government relations and regularly on calls with Treasury staff.
Except the Treasury official on this call with Krncevic had no idea he'd changed jobs, which is strange because it was well known around town and across the sector itself. News of his arrival at PwC was even written up here, in this column, but apparently Margin Call doesn't figure for daily reading in Treasury's Markets Division -- not when there are TED Talks by Bruce Pascoe and videos about unconscious bias that everyone needs to watch as a KPI.
Anyway, this call continues for a period of time, and we've confirmed that Krncevic and PwC ended up in receipt of some very confidential government information - again! - most likely MYEFO-related, given the timing, and at some point Krncevic actually interrupted his interlocutor and reminded them to ixnay on all the sensitive tidbits because, ah, didn't they know that he no longer worked at ASIC? But by then it was a little late.
Treasury was mortified, of course, and they raged at PwC demanding an explanation for this confidentiality breach, which was sort of their own fault, and which led to PwC initiating their own probe and asking questions like a) would it have been wise for Krncevic to have announced his PwC title upon engaging in the call, and b) should Treasury's boffins have just read their damn emails and not been so clueless about important movements in their industry?
No response from Treasury on that matter.
Krncevic, meanwhile, has already parted ways with PwC, his exit played to us as a mutual decision borne of adjustments to his job description, and nothing to do with the Treasury snafu. “The firm does not comment on individual employees,” a PwC spokeswoman said.
We did hear that PwC's management had decided to prohibit any engagements with members of parliament for at least another year, if not longer, which would have made Krncevic's job a bit pointless. And we're guessing this little episode just pushed out that timeline a little longer.
