Rear Window
Tom Seymour’s PwC tax scandal backsplash
Joe AstonColumnistPricewaterhouseCoopers CEO Tom Seymouris clinging to a wobbling branch hanging over a bottomless ravine but if you ask him, he’s on solid ground.
The high stupidity of contradicting evidence given to parliament by the Tax Practitioners Board is now apparent. After TPB secretary Michael O’Neill told a Senate committee that 20 or 30 PwC staff were involved in the leaking of secret tax legislation plans in 2014 and 2015, Seymour counter-claimed that “there [were] no findings that 30 people got the information”. It was all just “a perception issue,” he said.
PwC chief executive Tom Seymour. Pete Wallis
This week, the committee released 144 pages of redacted emails involving 53 PwC email addresses related to the leaked information.
Seymour updated his lines on Wednesday, conceding that “the behaviour displayed was unacceptable, and a matter we deeply regret”, while stressing that: “Those found to be directly involved in the breach of confidentiality arrangements in this matter have left the firm.”
There he goes again, dancing on the head of a pin, relying upon an absurdly narrow and legalistic construction of “found” and “involved”. Yeah, nah
When Seymour assures us that everyone found to be directly involved in the leak has left, he’s actually saying that a significant number of people who knowingly received the leaked information and acted upon it remain at PwC to this day.
Let’s just be clear, here: PwC used the Commonwealth’s confidential design and schedule of anti-tax avoidance legislation to design its own schemes for its clients to circumvent that legislation. The emails show them gloating about it, celebrating millions in new client revenue “heavily helped by the accuracy of the intelligence that [now disgraced PwC partner] Peter Collins was able to supply us”.
Excellent work cheating the taxpayer, team! Who cares that the Commonwealth is our biggest client.
Pray tell, Tom, how many were directly involved, and when did they leave? How many knew but looked the other way? Why did nobody – not one single person – put up their hand and say, “We should not be doing this”?
Seymour isn’t asking these questions himself because doing so might compel him to pull out the roots of the weeds, and he can’t do that because he’s one of them. He was there. Until 2016, he was managing partner of tax and legal. He was surrounded by people who knew.
So what does he do? He minimises, he redefines it as a legacy problem. It’s all in the past and all of the bad actors are gone. Let’s just focus on the future, shall we?
Newsflash: it’s not working. Seymour is the kid with a face full of cake mix swearing black and blue he never touched it. He has been deliberately misleading but everyone, absolutely everyone, can see him, the ironically named Tom Seymour, who can’t see two feet from his nose.
What’s he got in his grab bag after “sorry, not sorry”? Perhaps he’ll wheel in The Star casino’s former chair John O’Neill to advise PwC on inculcating “the primacy of suitability”.
Seymour seems to have no grasp of what’s at stake here, no real sense of how bad this is. His myopia may be the product of normalisation, of so many years at the highest echelons of a sophisticated influence trafficking and information laundering operation. Firms like PwC are experts in the absolute minimum standard of the law, in pushing it to the limit, in dancing on the edges, because that’s where the danger money is.
Not that there’s any real danger, since there are never any consequences. You take them right over the edge, but your client settles, your client pays, and you’ve still got your ticket.
To date, the only person who has suffered any financial penalty is Collins, though he certainly didn’t have to repay the epic bonuses he banked for the period he was sucking secrets out of Treasury and feeding them to his elated colleagues. He’s probably retired temporarily to his winery to dust his art collection. Hey, white-collar swindling pays. You’d only be a blue-collar thief if you were silly enough to start too young.
Seymour’s extraordinary clumsiness has made it increasingly likely he’ll cop a broken bottle in the jugular at the next partners’ meeting. He’ll be assuring them Jim Chalmers is totally cool behind the scenes, that this will all blow over. Meanwhile, on Thursday, Chalmers was venting his extreme displeasure at the firm.
The partners have just one creed – money – so they’ll take out Seymour not because of any desire for PwC to become an ethical organisation, but because he’s now shitting in their river of gold. That’s a transgression they will not abide.
