Virtue signallers, like PricewaterhouseCoopers, need to live up to their posturing

The PwC debacle reminds us that while bad behaviour stinks, when the sanctimonious behave badly, their reputational damage is far greater.

Just days after the 2016 US presidential election, Luke Sayers, pictured, sent a letter to PwC’s 7000 Australian employees offering staff emotional counselling after Donald Trump was elected president, writes Janet Albrechtsen. Picture: Michael Klein

Bible studies are probably con­sidered a medieval, conservative plot at PricewaterhouseCoopers. Shame. The firm could learn from St Paul’s warning to the Galatians: “As you sow, so shall you reap.”

This biblical lesson explains much of the well-deserved outrage directed at PwC. It serves also as a warning to other institutions that herald their virtue publicly, only to behave like scoundrels behind closed doors.

The antics of PwC merit every epithet thrown at it right now. Not only did it breach confidentiality agreements with the federal government to help clients dodge taxes it had been hired to help design, but it then used outlandish claims of legal professional privilege to defeat the Australian Taxation Office’s efforts to find out what was going on.

Tax Commissioner Chris Jordan told a parliamentary committee this week that PwC was behind no fewer than 15 schemes to help multinationals avoid the taxes PwC was engaged to help construct. Unsurprisingly, Reserve Bank governor Philip Lowe wants more accountability from PwC given it was playing poacher and gamekeeper at the same time on taxes.

What makes the biblical warning so apt here is not merely that PwC has behaved so badly. The firm has been so damned sanctimonious, indeed at the forefront of wokery for many years.

And now it is discovering that when you flaunt your values-driven social conscience, people expect a sound moral compass when it comes to your core business, too. When you fall short of business morality, expect to be judged more harshly than ordinary sinners.

Everyone has their favourite example of PwC smug moralising. Mine dates from the period when legendary chief progressive Luke Sayers ran the firm. Sayers was, before his ascension to the CEO position, the head of tax – that’s right, the same department where tax partner Peter Collins was at his most productive playing both sides of the tax street.

Around the time when PwC was suffering its moral failures about its core business of giving tax advice, Sayers launched his firm to new heights of virtue-signalling absurdity. Just days after the 2016 US presidential election, Sayers sent a letter to PwC’s 7000 Australian employees offering staff emotional counselling after Donald Trump was elected president. By all means, Sayers was entitled to mutter privately about deplorables voting for Trump, but it takes a heightened sense of self-righteousness to shout it from the rooftops in such a fashion.

That was after PwC’s highly political report earlier in 2016, also under Sayers, purporting to tally up the costs of a same-sex marriage plebiscite – the inference apparently being why bother wasting money asking ordinary Australians what they think. Just leave the decision to our finely tuned elite moral compass.

While Sayers has had the good judgment to keep his head down, the firm’s “About us” web page can only attract awkward attention. Touting something called the New Equation, the firm says its purpose is to “build trust in society” and to “help Australia to continue to grow and thrive”. I guess stiffing the country of tax revenue by ignoring confidentiality agreements with government could be a New Equation of business morality if your god is Gordon Gekko.

Alas, PwC is not the only hypocritical, attention-seeking accounting firm.

-

Just days after the 2016 US presidential election, Sayers sent a letter to PwC’s 7000 Australian employees offering staff emotional counselling after Donald Trump was elected president.

-

With nauseating hubris, the KPMG leadership sent an email to staff last week saying “we can no longer sit by and watch our profession be tarnished by the unethical actions of a few”. This is the firm that was fined $US450,000 in 2021 by the US audit watchdog over “widespread” cheating on tests required to meet professional development standards. Last year its British affiliate was fined £14m for creating false documents and retroactively editing spreadsheets in relation to its Carillion and Regenersis audits. Don’t those running KPMG realise people are laughing at their hubris?

It is not merely the bogus ethical claims that irritate Australians, be it from business leaders, politicians and even sporting figures who proclaim their supposed superior morality from every rooftop. Many of them go further and want to impose their views, values and ethics (such as they are) on the rest of us. Particularly on the voice, but also on other issues ranging from climate to the monarchy and Australia Day, we are told that if we don’t do what these elites tell us, we are racist or immoral.

Even when adherence to the latest progressive fad involves trashing long-held fundamentals, such as the presumption of innocence and due process, some of these self-aggrandisers think nothing of ruining lives in pursuit of spruiking their virtue.

Take the AFL debacle. Alastair Clarkson, Chris Fagan and Jason Burt had marvellous careers and stellar reputations when dragged into untested, hotly disputed claims of racism against certain Hawthorn Indigenous footballers.

This week, the AFL announced its probe had ended and had made no adverse findings, but that’s not much comfort to three men who have been accused of shocking things, apparently without foundation. It remains beyond belief that such serious allegations could be made against the men in a review commissioned by Hawthorn and handed to the AFL without any attempt to include the alleged perpetrators’ side of the story.

If the goal of cultural sensitivity is allowed to override, indeed destroy, fundamental principles such as natural justice and the presumption of innocence, we have a profound societal problem. Not even that Australian touchstone principle of a fair go is safe any more.

If football authorities had been able to resist the need to be seen to prosecute even the most contentious and unproven claims of racism, the (hopefully temporary) ruination of these men’s lives could have been avoided.

Have these pious elites learned nothing? The practical antidote to all this faux public moralising is that it quickly becomes counter-productive. Bud Light sales have seen consistent falls of 25 per cent week on week after it allied itself with a transgender influencer. Any claim by businesses of climate virtue is now regarded with suspicion as potential “greenwashing”.

Speaking of reputation washing, hands up those who are cynical about National Australia Bank, the leading bank villain at the banking royal commission. It lost its chairman, Ken Henry, and chief executive, Andrew Thorburn, to scathing assessments by Kenneth Hayne but is now trying to redeem itself by ruthlessly enforcing adherence to its pro-voice line and by tying bonuses to completion of compulsory Indigenous cultural awareness training.

That’s the other thing about modern virtue-signallers. Some are so ensconced in hawking their virtue, they’ve lost sight of how some of their peers perceive them.

Since Wednesday, I have heard from other senior business leaders who reject Wesfarmers’ chairman Michael Chaney’s claim that other big companies “universally” shared his views about the voice. Including this from a well-known chief executive of a big Australian company: “Apart from Chaney’s claim about ‘universal agreement’ being nonsense, all the CEOs including many large company CEOs that I know (and their media advisers) have been told ‘not to comment’ [if they disagree with Chaney] for fear of retribution. The debate is far from an open and honest exchange of ideas – it is frightening, charged with a fear of retribution – of destruction of reputation and of forced and almost complete gagging of contrary views.”

Quite apart from the fact there is not much virtue in gagging contrary views, one wonders how long it will be before the class-action litigators jump into the fray.

There are surely legitimate questions to be asked as to whether political posturing by those who lead entities set up for particular purposes is consistent with their entity’s mission and their governing documents.

The legality of corporate moralising with shareholders money is also a potentially fertile field of inquiry for hungry litigators, as is the question of what advice companies have taken before declaring a position on say, the voice.

While sporting and cultural bodies dependent on government largesse or policy may feel they must support the voice given the Albanese government treats those who disagree with the voice as moral reprobates, that is an explanation, not an excuse for these bodies breaching their objects.

This takes us back to our starting point. The PwC debacle reminds us that while bad behaviour stinks, when the sanctimonious behave badly, their reputational damage is far greater.