The Department of Finance has told the Australian Greens’ Senator Barbara Pocock to speak with the Australian Signals Directorate if she wants specifics about contracts involving embattled Big Four firm PwC Australia.
Finance responded to a question on notice put by Pocock related to a contract PwC had with the ASD following her querying why PwC Australia getting any contracts with departments or agencies involved in guarding secrets given the breach of confidentiality on tax policy that has seen the firm dominate headlines for more than 18 months.
Finance tells Pocock to call ASD
Greed not so good
As a 20-something, I experienced Oliver Stone’s 1987 movie masterpiece Wall Street, which spawned Gordon Gecko’s famous maxim “Greed is good”. Rolling forward a few decades and Ed Tadros’ laudable series on the PwC tax leaks scandal clearly illustrates that some partners ruthlessly applied Gecko’s business model.
The impact of PwC’s appalling conduct is exacerbated by a “who’s who” of government and professional regulators all pointing the finger of accountability at each other. The parliamentary committee chaired by Senator Deborah O’Neill has the unenviable job of uncovering what happened and why, in a setting where the main protagonist is seemingly reluctant to co-operate.
The government will also have to create a new road map for supervision of the accounting profession, with the very associations that aided and abetted the PwC types turning a blind eye towards their egregious behaviours.
Adults (excluding PwC partners) know that greed is not good. It makes otherwise sensible people do things that discredit themselves and their organisation. In PwC’s case it has also irreparably damaged trust in the accounting profession.
C.M. Abbott, Leeming, WA
PwC had a simple choice
Providing legal and accounting advice to multinational corporations and governments on complicated taxation issues is a demanding professional skill that requires years of learning and practise. It is a hard and challenging thing to do.
Understanding confidentiality, or the proper application of legal professional privilege to confidential client communications, is not. If someone tells you a secret, you keep it a secret. That fundamental requirement is backed up by onerous professional obligations, and the law.
While calls to impose corporate-style regulation on professional partnerships after the behaviour of PwC in its relationship with the ATO may be understandable, such regulation is unnecessary.
What is necessary is to hold professionals to their individual ethical and other professional responsibilities. If you seek to make a more than adequate living from being a professional adviser, to accept the right to be called a professional and charge like one, then you must accept the responsibilities, the duties, of behaving like one, including the proper maintenance of your clients’ confidences and privileges. This is, and should be, your personal responsibility, not that of the partnership or other structure to which you may belong.
If you ignore or relinquish your personal professional duties, you are no longer a trusted professional adviser but someone who simply puts figures into a spreadsheet, or words into a document, and clients will be rightly wary of trusting you with their confidential information, or paying you your professional-level fees.
Michael Will, Deakin, ACT
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Commissioner to have ‘express power’ in holding robodebt
leaders to account |
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The federal government will introduce legislation that gives the
Australian Public Service commissioner power to investigate former agency
heads for alleged breaches of the APS Code of Conduct. |
Robodebt reprieves gone
Public Service Minister Katy Gallagher said the legislation would "ensure that senior public servants are clearly accountable for their actions as public service leaders, even after leaving their roles".
The Canberra Times can reveal APS Commissioner Gordon de Brouwer was close to wrapping up his investigations of 16 individuals over potential code of conduct breaches in administering the robodebt scheme, when he was forced to pause after some former agency heads argued they could not be investigated.
An amendment to the Public Service Act, to be introduced into Parliament on Wednesday, will give the commissioner an "express power" to investigate former agency heads for alleged breaches, make determinations and finalise matters.
"The robodebt scheme was a shameful chapter of public administration," Senator Gallagher said.
"We want to make sure a scheme like this can never happen again."
Senator Gallagher said it was critical the investigations were "concluded as soon as possible".
"Where appropriate, those involved from the public service must be held to account," she said.
"The commissioner's powers are essential to upholding this standard and maintaining public confidence in the vital institution that is the Australian Public Service."
The royal commission report had referred only current public servants for investigation, but the Public Service Commission extended referrals to include former APS employees, current ones named in the report but not the sealed section, and former agency heads.The changes to the Public Service Act, which will apply retrospectively if passed, have been expedited to clarify that former agency heads can be held to account for breaches of the code of conduct while they were an agency head, in the same manner as current and former APS employees.
The illegal robodebt scheme established by the former Coalition government automatically raised debts against welfare recipients by comparing their reported income with averaged annual pay data from the Australian Tax Office.
"It pursued debt recovery against Australians who in many cases had no debt to pay," Senator Gallagher said.
The Public Service Commission decided which bureaucrats to investigate over robodebt by setting up a code of conduct taskforce to weigh whether there were sufficient grounds in each case referred to it.
Agency heads are bound by the code of conduct, which requires them to discharge their duties with care and diligence, honesty and integrity, treat everyone with respect and courtesy and comply with Australian laws.
The code also requires bureaucrats to behave at all times in a way that upholds APS values and the integrity and good reputation of the employee's agency and the Australian Public Service.
The royal commission's final report recommended mechanisms to discipline former agency heads be bolstered.
It included a sealed chapter that recommended referrals of individuals for civil and criminal prosecution, and called out the "repeated failures" and lack of independence by senior public servants who administered the robodebt scheme.
The Albanese government has agreed, or agreed to in-principle, each of the 56 recommendations in the royal commission's 990-page report, tabled in Parliament in July 2023.
"Robodebt was a crude and cruel mechanism, neither fair nor legal, and it made many people feel like criminals," the commission wrote in the report.
"People were traumatised on the off-chance they might owe money. It was a costly failure of public administration, in both human and economic terms."