Carlton boss should be banned from government work, report told

A report into the PwC scandal has been told to ban Carlton president Luke Sayers from bidding for government consultancy.

Carlton president Luke Sayers should be banned from applying for government contracts for five years at his new business, the Greens have told a report into the PwC scandal.

The final 186-page report into how the consulting firm sold government secrets for profit was handed down on Wednesday.

The Senate finance committee made 12 recommendations, including demanding that PwC come clean about the actions of its senior staff.

The committee also recommended that contracts be written more clearly and that any consultancy work worth more than $2 million be revealed twice a year.

There was a 49-page additional contribution within the report from Australian Greens Senator Barbara Pocock targeting Mr Sayers.

“Any consulting entity led by Mr Luke Sayers should be excluded from Australian Government contracting until those investigations are concluded and any of their implications in relation to Mr Sayers considered and concluded,” Ms Pocock said in the report.

Luke Sayers, a former chief executive of PwC, has supported reform of the consulting sector.

Mr Sayers opened up a new consultancy named after himself in 2020 after he had departed PwC, where he was paid $30 million over eight years.

Ms Pocock said that Mr Sayers was chief executive of PwC when the company was breaching its confidentiality requirements.

She described the PwC’s close relationship with government officials as like having “foxes in the hen house.”

Mr Sayers has consistently denied knowing anything about how senior partners leaked government tax advice to clients for profit.

He had met Australian Taxation Office Second Commissioner Jeremy Hirschhorn in August 2019 but claimed he had not been told to read the emails about the scandal.

When asked about the final report, a spokesman said Mr Sayers supported the long overdue reform of the sector.

He added “the separate opinions of the Greens had not been supported by the committee.”

Ms Pocock said in her recommendations that there were details about that meeting that had “not been previously put on the public record”.

She said that Mr Hirschhorn had “read out ‘several representative PwC emails’” about concerns about practices at PwC during the 2019 meeting.

Senator Barbara Pocock. Picture: NewsWire/Martin Ollman

“This must have been a memorable experience for Mr Sayers,” she said.

“However, Mr Sayers has maintained to this committee and publicly that he has no memory of these emails being drawn to his attention.

“To say that this memory failure is plausible is to stretch credibility.”

Labor Senator Deborah O’Neill said the additional recommendations on Mr Sayers were not presented to the full committee.

“It is a shame that these additions were not brought to the committee in the same nonpartisan spirit that has defined the inquiry, and did not have the capacity to be bolstered by potential cross-party deliberation, consultation or support,” she said.

The Federal Government has turned off the tap on consultancy work, cutting at least $1 billion in the May federal budget.

They have been bringing more decisions in house to be dealt with by public servants.

Originally published as Carlton boss should be banned from government work, report told