Torture by a thousand cuts: Why the PwC scandal won’t die

And the firm has parachuted in PwC’s global legal business solutions leader, Tony O’Malley, to a role of chief risk and ethics leader for PwC Australia. And that’s to take effect immediately.

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The global business will be desperate the Australian scandal doesn’t bleed into the international business.

One of his jobs will be to implement any recommendations made by former Telstra chief Ziggy Switkowski, who has been named to head an independent review into the scandal.

If Switkowski recommends that partners or other PwC professionals should face the firing squad, O’Malley is in charge of the bullets.

There must be a number of internal tax experts sweating on the outcome. Heads should roll.

PwC’s behaviour was breathtaking, with suggestions that the firm marketed to firms including Google, Microsoft and Apple using its ill-gotten intelligence wares.

But the most staggering aspect to this scandal is that it appears no one inside PwC who was aware of what was going on stopped to consider the risks.

In attempting to profiteer from breaching confidentiality of the government, PwC chose the wrong institution to double-cross.

In the first instance, the big four accounting/advisory firms are huge government clients, so abusing trust and ensuring that they won’t get work again any time soon – or possibly ever – is strategically ludicrous.

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Second, betraying an institution with the loudest microphone in the country is excessively risky. The Labor government can keep this scandal live for as long as it likes and the Greens and crossbenchers can easily raise their profile by piling on.

To the extent the government has an agenda to ease off on using external advisory consultants, the PwC misconduct is manna from heaven.

Sure the government (current and former) has also sustained a bit of a black eye for being naive about whom it lets into the tent. The good news for the government (but the bad news for PwC) is that there are ample means for public torture, including a Senate estimates flogging, which led to the disclosure of all kinds of PwC internal emails uncovering how broadly the information had been disseminated through the firm, and how it was being used to drum up new business.

And now we have another Senate probe into the big four consultants by the Finance and Public Administration Committee, which is set to run until September 26.

This is a scandal that refuses to die.

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