Loose lips and sinking ships at PwC; American Express chalks up win against Collard

PwC tarnished its image with the tax leaks scandal but perhaps this time Treasury ought to take some of the blame? Picture: Damian Shaw

Accounting firm PwC famously torched its relationship with Treasury during the tax leaks affair, which involved someone blabbing away a bunch of government secrets to help enrich a few corporate clients.

Well, it’s happened again – the blabbing – except this time it’s not PwC responsible for being loose-lipped but actually Treasury’s people who were silly enough to give away classified information.

And they’re angry about it too – angry enough to have demanded answers from PwC. Because it wasn’t their fault, see? It was PwC’s fault! And you can imagine that this incredible embarrassment is doing nothing to help release PwC from the deep-freeze of reputational pariahdom, to once again be regarded as a bona fide keeper of high-level confidences.

This incident unfolded in October when someone within Treasury’s Market Conduct division, led by Assistant Secretary Tom Dickson, took a call from PwC’s newly-minted head of government affairs, Jesse Krncevic.

Krncevic’s role immediately prior to PwC was at the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, where he was head of government relations and regularly on calls with Treasury staff.

Except the Treasury official on this call with Krncevic had no idea he’d changed jobs, which is strange because it was well known around town and across the sector itself. News of his arrival at PwC was even written up here, in this column, but apparently Margin Call doesn’t figure for daily reading in Treasury’s Markets Division – not when there are TED Talks by Bruce Pascoe and videos about unconscious bias that everyone needs to watch as a KPI.

Anyway, this call continues for a period of time, and we’ve confirmed that Krncevic and PwC ended up in receipt of some very confidential government information – again! – most likely MYEFO-related, given the timing, and at some point Krncevic actually interrupted his interlocutor and reminded them to ixnay on all the sensitive tidbits because, ah, didn’t they know that he no longer worked at ASIC? But by then it was a little late.

Treasury was mortified, of course, and they raged at PwC demanding an explanation for this confidentiality breach, which was sort of their own fault, and which led to PwC initiating their own probe and asking questions like a) would it have been wise for Krncevic to have announced his PwC title upon engaging in the call, and b) should Treasury’s boffins have just read their damn emails and not been so clueless about important movements in their industry?

No response from Treasury on that matter.

Krncevic, meanwhile, has already parted ways with PwC, his exit played to us as a mutual decision borne of adjustments to his job description, and nothing to do with the Treasury snafu. “The firm does not comment on individual employees,” a PwC spokeswoman said.

We did hear that PwC’s management had decided to prohibit any engagements with members of parliament for at least another year, if not longer, which would have made Krncevic’s job a bit pointless. And we’re guessing this little episode just pushed out that timeline a little longer.

The Geelong grifter

More bills racking up for Geelong’s finest grifter, David Collard, once publicly praised as a “force of nature” by Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles, who really wishes he never said that.

An addition to Collard’s long list of creditors – the biggest being the Australian Taxation Office – is American Express, which has just been awarded a default judgment ordering Collard to repay a bill of $US746,328, or just over $1.18m, plus interest, costs and disbursements.

David Collard at the Manhattan Supreme Court in New York last year.

Small change, however, compared to the ballpark $126m that Collard owes the ATO, and the millions that are still to be paid to colleagues and friends who lent him their life savings, plus debts to his suppliers, employees and many others chasing him for their entitlements.

Up the garden path

John Howard has been laying low over the past week but there he was a few days ago, spotted with a substantial bruise on his face while out and about in the CBD.

Everyone wanted to know what caused this mean-looking contusion. An errant cricket ball to the face? (We’ve seen how he bowls, it’s not too zany a hypothesis.)

Former prime minister John Howard had a slip-up in his garden. Picture: Monique Harmer

Unable to contain our curiosity, we approached his office to tell us what happened and they said he’d fallen and had now fully recovered.

But how did it occur? Was it an accident? Did it happen during his morning constitutional?

The spokesman again: “He was walking along his garden path at home and simply lost his footing.”

Which can happen to the best of us … when we’re led up the garden path.