PwC to provide vaccines for staff and their families, backs opening up Australia

Chief executive Tom Seymour says PwC will offer vaccines to its more than 8000 staff and their families by the end of the year – but it won’t be mandatory.

PwC Australia is on track to roll out a vaccination program for its workforce of more than 8000 and their families before Christmas, with CEO Tom Seymour backing a plan to reopen the country following a stop-start year for the advisory firm.

But Mr Seymour doesn’t currently intend to make it mandatory for staff to be vaccinated – believing the growing number of barriers to movement unvaccinated people are set to face in a post-Covid world will help convince the fence sitters.

“As soon as we can get access to vaccinations, we will offer staff and their families vaccinations through work … I would love to think we’d have that in place by Christmas,” Mr Seymour said.

“We’re not planning on mandating vaccinations. But that said we are continuing to follow the advice of governments and I do see a world where it is likely you will need to have a vaccine, and you will need to be able to demonstrate you are vaccinated to do a range of things.”

He added that the company’s vaccination program would also cover booster shots if they become part of Australia’s future Covid strategy.

“It’s inevitable that the community is going to need to transition from wanting no Covid cases to wanting high vaccine rates and Covid rates that are manageable in the community,” he said.

“We need to reopen our borders, we need to reopen our communities, we need to get kids back to school and we need to get people back to work.”

PwC Australia handed down a broadly flat-full year revenue result of $2.59bn, with Mr Seymour saying the firm powered through a difficult first half to bounce back in the second.

“Second half results across the business, particularly the deals activity, really came back in the second half – and it has continued – so we sit here pretty confident about the year ahead,” he said.

But PwC partners weren’t left out in the cold, scoring an on average 18 per cent pay rise, following a 15 per cent decline in 2020.

Demand was particularly high for cyber, infrastructure and health advisory services but the core Australian tax and assurance business also enjoyed revenue growth of 7 per cent to $650m.

Deals and consulting experienced strong growth in demand towards the end of 2020, but the main Australian business was ultimately offset by a 18 per cent decline in overseas revenue to $230m.

Mr Seymour said it highlighted how well Australia had managed Covid compared to the overseas division’s markets of PNG and South-East Asia, as well as the disruption caused by restrictive border controls making it harder to move staff in and out.

However, the current restrictions in NSW and Victoria have done little to disrupt PwC’s pipeline of work – although Mr Seymour said the impact it was having on staff was noticeable.

“Where we are much more aware of the impact of the lockdowns both in NSW and in Victoria is on our people, and the resilience of our people,” he said.

Although business conditions were tough over the last year PwC – like many in the advisory industry – did not slow down its hiring, recruiting a record 856 new graduates and a record 145 new partners.

Just under half of the new partner intake are women, who now represent one-third of all partners.

However, the pay gap between female and male partners remained visible at 14 per cent – although Mr Seymour said this was due to a higher proportion of senior partners being male, a situation that was changing.

“That 14 per cent is decreasing year on year as we admit more female partners and they move through and become senior partners and earn the higher income of senior partners,” he said.

“But it’s a reflection today of the fact we still have more senior male partners than senior female partners, because of history.”