Treasurer refuses to release information on PwC tax leak probe

Treasurer Jim Chalmers has blocked a Senate inquiry from accessing communications between the Australian Tax Office and Australian Federal Police in 2019 about the decision not to launch a criminal probe into the PwC tax leak scandal.

A letter from Chalmers this week to the Senate inquiry into the consulting industry says that releasing the information could prejudice the AFP’s current criminal probe into the alleged misuse of confidential government information.

“Following consultations between Treasury, the Australian Tax Office and the Australian Federal Police about the documents in scope, I am advised that return of the documents could prejudice the ongoing police investigation into PwC. As such, I claim public interest immunity in respect of all of the documents in scope,” Chalmers wrote in the letter to the Senate president.

Chalmers declined to comment further, but has been scathing of PwC’s conduct. Treasury played a central role in referring the investigation to the federal police.

“People are understandably and justifiably angry,” the treasurer said in May, soon after the depth of the scandal was revealed.

Former PwC partner Peter Collins signed the first of a series of confidentiality agreements with Treasury in 2015 concerning plans to combat tax avoidance by multinationals such as Google. He leaked the information to PwC partners within months to help devise, and market, plans to the same companies being targeted by the proposed new laws.

The Tax Office first contacted the AFP about PwC in March 2018, and after a year, the force determined it could not proceed with a criminal investigation. It was only this year that the Tax Practitioners Board revealed Collins had been banned for two years over the matter.

The federal police launched an investigation in May, following the release of emails to a Senate estimates committee that detailed the scale of the operation within PwC, to globally profit from the confidential information.