‘I would not do it again’: KPMG whistleblower reveals toll of going public

The former KPMG executive who revealed allegations that senior staff at the firm had used confidential material from major companies to win work says speaking out has had devastating consequences.

In documents published by a parliamentary committee investigating the anonymous whistleblower’s allegations – several of which have been confirmed to be true – the ex-KPMG employee detailed the strategies allegedly used against them.

“If I were asked, genuinely, whether I would do this again, my answer would be no,” he wrote. “Not because the matters were not worth raising, and not because I regret raising them, but because of what I now know, and could not have known then, about what disclosing them at a firm like KPMG, in the legal and regulatory environment that exists in Australia today, actually involves.”

The whistleblower informed KPMG of the allegations, which included that senior staff had accessed board papers from Lendlease and used them to help win work from Westpac, in 2024 but has said he faced years of obfuscation and retaliation from the consultancy firm.

The whistleblower’s submission was published after a blockbuster day of hearings on Friday in which Lendlease’s chairman criticised a “fundamental breach of trust” by KPMG and former independent director Mike Baird said he had been too trusting of the firm…

 

The paper tiger ban: the fine print that might save KPMG's federal contracts

Mid-tier audit firms are circling to capture expiring KPMG contracts worth nearly $200 million amid the firm's ban from bidding for new federal contracts. However, a current loophole in the fine print may hinder those opportunities.

ATO fails on risk management and tax collection, as ‘friends’ mark tax office’s homework

Billions lost to fraud, collectable debt doubled – and the Australian Taxation Office has somehow awarded itself a gold star for performance.

Liam Malone

Captain Kirk said ‘risk is our business’. At the ATO the mission is the same but the tax office fails to collect. Picture: CBS via Getty Images

James Tiberius Kirk, captain of the USS Enterprise in the hit TV show Star Trek once said: “Risk is our business.”

Risk is also the main business of the Australian Taxation Office. 

Effective risk management is central to all organisations in the public and private sector. 

The ATO’s main job is to protect the revenue. Fraud controls, fraud protection and investigations are central. 

In recent years, the ATO has failed in preventing and responding to fraud, with the result that several billion dollars has gone out the door to fraudsters. 

In addition, the ATO has failed in debt collection. The ATO collectable debt more than doubled in only a six-year period. Collectable debt as at June 30, 2019, was $26.5bn, and as at June 30, 2025, was $54.6bn. The ATO has largely tried to blame the Covid years for this blowout, but this is not credible, or acceptable. 

Yet the Tax Commissioner, in a recent speech posted to the ATO website, stated that: “An APS review last year confirmed the ATO is a high performing agency.” 

Mr Tax Commissioner, with respect, are you serious?

ATO commissioner Rob Heferen and ASIC commissioner Kate O'Rourke. Picture: John Feder

Approximately $2bn have gone out the door to fraudsters in 2022-23, and collectable debt has doubled. 

I guess it helps when your mate marks your homework, in this case an Australian public service review of an Australian public service agency – the Australian Taxation Office. What a convenient arrangement. Don’t worry about what taxpayers, tax agents and businesses think about your performance, just get a big tick from another part of the government bureaucracy. 

After the massive fraud on the ATO by tens of thousands of individuals, the ATO was rightly subject to much attention and criticism in the media. The ATO rejected this criticism. 

Indeed, in early 2022, an ATO senior executive service officer was quoted in the media that the ATO had “swooped in quickly” and stated that a “10 out of 10” effort was put in to stop fraudulent attempts. 

If such a massive failure had occurred in the private sector, then it is highly likely that senior management would have been held accountable. Senior managers may have lost their positions. However, in the cosy world of the Australian public service this is not going to happen.

Perhaps it may be referred to as a “challenge” before, in due course, the self-congratulation culture continues. So, in 2025, only a few years after a massive fraud failure, the ATO is “a high performing agency”. What a remarkable turnaround. 

The problem with the ATO and the wider APS is that the central focus of risk management is reputational risk. This is mostly about the organisation having a good public image, hence the frequent use of positive rhetoric – bureaucratic spin. 

The loss of billions of dollars to fraud in recent years is due to a failure of systems, culture and most importantly, management. 

The primary compliance products of the ATO are audits and reviews. The ATO tracks all information on audits and reviews through its case management system. 

However, the ATO does not want the public to know those numbers and outcomes, as it refuses to report the information in its annual reports. So much for transparency. 

ATO senior management concerns are all about the numbers of audits and reviews. The Inspector-General of Taxation (now known as the Tax Ombudsman) has made frequent criticism of a lack of ATO transparency. 

In 2024, the Australian National Audit Office audit issued a damning report on the ATO, stating the ATO fraud framework was “not fit for purpose”.

The report made a number of recommendations. The ATO stated it was adopting the recommendations and hence all good, nothing to see here.

In fact, now only a few years later, the ATO is an alleged high performing agency. 

Perhaps young people should consider pursuing a career in the APS senior executive service. The jobs are very well paid, and your career will be pretty much risk-free.

Good work if you can get it, so why take a risky path in business.

The silver medal for fraud failure goes to the ATO. The gold medal, of course, goes to the NDIS.

Liam Malone was an ATO auditor for a total of 19 years across two periods of service. His experience included leading audits and reviews of multinational company groups and serious noncompliance audit cases, including a secondment to the AFP investigating tax schemes. He also worked on small and medium business cases.

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ATO plays the tough cop on tax but its officers are desk jockeys

The tax man is focused on those who pay, not those who don’t

ATO tax data shows that when politicians talk about 'average Australians', they’re not talking about most Australians 

 It might surprise people to realise just how little a majority of Australians earn. We are often told about average earnings and even average full-time earnings. But averages are not “the middle”. They are merely the sum of all earnings by all people working in Australia divided by the number of those workers.

What is the middle income for Australians? Each year, the ATO Taxation Statistics provide some insight into this topic, and this year’s release is particularly pertinent because it covers the 2023-24 financial year – the same one in which the government made changes to the Stage 3 tax cuts.

Six years ago, then opposition leader, Anthony Albanese, suggested that he did not “regard someone who’s earning $200,000 dollars a year as being from the top end of town”.

At the time, such a statement was pretty extraordinary from a Labor Party leader, given that in 2019-20, earnings of $200,000 would have put you in the top 4% of income earners in Australia.

But what about in the most recent figures? Is $200,000 still at the top end, or has it become common? After all, in January 2024, Anthony Albanese announced changes to the Stage 3 Tax cuts that would increase the top tax threshold to $190,000 and lift the 30% threshold to $135,000.

Where is middle Australia in all of this?

It might surprise people to realise just how little a majority of Australians earn.

We are often told about average earnings and even average full-time earnings. But averages are not “the middle”. They are merely the sum of all earnings by all people working in Australia divided by the number of those workers.

The old line is that if you had 5 people in a room, each earning $50,000, and a person came in who earned $6m a year, then, on average, everyone in the room would now be a millionaire ($6.25m/6 = $1.042m average).

We also know (as I wrote about here) that men earn a higher average salary in 96% of all occupations in Australia. This mean the average earnings of men is higher than the average earnings of women, and the same goes for full-time.

But the median earnings is the amount at which half earn less than, and half earn more than. (In the previous example, the median earnings remain $50,000, regardless of whether the person earning $6m is in the room or not – half earn $50,000 or less, and half earn $50,000 or more in both scenarios)

To work out the median, the ATO divides all 13.239m Australians who paid tax in 2023-24 into 100 blocks – called percentiles. So, the 132,399 Australians who earned the least amount are in the 1^st (or lowest) percentile, and the 132,399 who earned the most are in the 100^th (or top) percentile.

From this, we can work out where lies “middle Australia”.

In 2023-24, the median income was $72,794. Earning $169,664 put you in the top 10% and as for $200,000, that still had you earning more than 95% of all Australians. Pointedly, 25% earned less than $47,302, which was just above the full-time minimum wage of $45,905 for that year:

But the story doesn’t end there. Because men earn more than women, there are more men in the higher earning percentiles than there are women (and vice versa)

What this means is that half of women are below the 43^rd income percentile and half of men are below the 58^th percentile. In effect, if you are a woman and you earned the median income of $72,794, you earned more than most women, but a man earning that amount earned less than most men.

The end result is that for 2023-24, these are the following average and median earnings:

So, always be aware that when you hear a politician talk about average Australians, that is probably not a majority of them.