Does Switkowski have the mongrel needed to deal with PwC?

The corporate runaway train hurtling towards a crash – otherwise known as PwC – has appointed veteran troubleshooter Ziggy Switkowski to investigate the cause of its tax scandal. It will be a controversial choice.

The bloke, a nuclear physicist and affectionately considered a nerd, has the job of identifying what went so spectacularly wrong at the accounting giant. This includes who is to blame and how it should be fixed – and he has four months to get it done.

Ziggy Switkowski: Trouble magnet.

How to rehabilitate a casino; how to restore a disgraced bank’s cultural shortcomings; how to develop Australia’s nuclear future; or how best to sticky tape the country’s dodgy broadband rollout? Switkowski seems to be the person on speed dial.

But the root and branch review ordered by PwC requires a degree of mongrel – a trait Switkowski is not known for.

PwC is certainly talking tough, saying this week: “We will not hesitate to take the recommended actions [by Switkowski], including, where appropriate, exiting further people and partners from the firm.”

It’s clear enough that something was spectacularly wrong inside PwC’s governance and culture when one of its partners, Peter Collins – having been taken into the government tent to assist with tightening tax avoidance laws – ignored confidentiality provisions and instead shared this intelligence with others in the firm, who in turn used the information to drum up new corporate clients.

This was no “one rotten apple” situation. Others inside PwC were aware of what Collins had done, and many more were recipients of emails about this marketing drive even though they were not aware of its provenance.

Now an ever-growing lynching mob is looking for appropriate accountability.

Switkowski is a self-professed “magnet for trouble”, having been involved in plenty of corporate war zones. But he has not gained a reputation as someone who recommends institutional demolition and complete rebuild. He is more about renovation.

At one time he was seen as a go-to guy for the Liberal Party. For example, he was Tony Abbott’s captain’s pick to chair the NBN in 2013 when it was struggling with the rollout of its service to all Australian households.

Abbott and his then communications minister, Malcolm Turnbull, wanted to overhaul Labor’s plan for the near universal rollout of the broadband fibre network, supplementing it with a cheaper mixture of different technologies.

Switkowski is a self-professed ‘magnet for trouble’, having been involved in plenty of corporate war zones.

Earlier, Switkowski had been tapped on the shoulder by the Howard government to review the hotly contested topic of developing nuclear energy in Australia.

Students of corporate history will remember him as the former chief executive of Telstra, who was ultimately pushed out by a deeply divided and dysfunctional board of directors at a time when Switkowski himself admitted the telco was facing challenges.

More recently, Switkowski was parachuted into Westpac as part of a three-person team tasked with assessing what ailed the banking giant, after the money-laundering compliance scandal that cost it more than $1.3 billion.

Former prime minister Tony Abbott chose Ziggy Zwitkowski to chair NBN.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

An Australian Financial Review columnist remarked at the time that “the panel adopted an extremely sympathetic, even indulgent attitude in evaluating the board’s responsibility” and that “the advisory panel largely exonerates the Westpac board from any responsibility in the sorry saga”.

The report stood in stark contrast to a review commissioned by the prudential regulator APRA into the Commonwealth Bank in 2018 slamming the board and senior management and culture, citing its widespread complacency, overconfidence, excessive complexity and insularity.

More recently still, Switkowski accepted the controversial role as chairman of Crown Resorts following several inquiries into the casino’s misdeeds that found Crown facilitated millions of dollars being laundered through a bank account of its subsidiary, and allowed operators with links to organised crime to arrange for junket players to gamble at the casino.

Switkowski’s casino gig to oversee Crown’s rehabilitation was short-lived, ending abruptly when the company was acquired by private equity firm Blackstone.

PwC is shaping up as a challenge every bit the size of the others.

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