Carlton boss Sayers rejects blame over PwC scandal

Carlton Football Club president Luke Sayers has insisted he did not know about the tax confidentiality breaches that occurred while he was in charge at PwC, and denied any responsibility for the win-at-all-costs culture being blamed for the company’s tax scandal.

Sayers told a Senate inquiry into consulting services on Thursday that he was not aware of any breaches of confidentiality until well after he had left the firm. He was chief executive of PwC from 2012 to 2020.

Former PwC chief executive Luke Sayers said he had no knowledge of the breaches while he was in charge.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

“Let me clearly say if the ATO had directly informally advised me as the CEO of PwC Australia that [former PwC tax partner] Peter Collins had breached obligations of confidence, I would have sought details and ensured a full and thorough investigation. They did not,” Sayers said.

Sayers’ testimony attracted heated exchanges with the Senate committee after he said he could not recall a conversation with ATO second commissioner Jeremy Hirschhorn, who claims he advised Sayers to look through concerning emails that PwC provided to the Australian Taxation Office.

“I referred to several of the emails in that discussion to give a flavour of the things we were concerned about,” Hirschhorn told the committee last month of his conversation with Sayers.

At that time, the ATO had already determined that confidential information had been leaked by a PwC partner, but it was unable to legally share this information.

”You don’t recall. How do we accept that as an answer?” Senator Richard Colbeck asked Sayers on Thursday.

“If he did say that statement, ‘Go and have a look at the emails’, which emails?” Sayers said to the committee.

Senator Deborah O’Neill suggested he could have asked Hirschhorn at the meeting.

“If it had happened, I would have asked,” he replied.

“Are you calling Mr Hirschhorn a liar,” she asked.

“I’m not calling anyone [a liar],” Sayers said.

At the public hearing on Thursday, senators also accused PwC of failing to come clean to the public about the scandal, despite the release of reports and data on its internal investigations into how the alleged misuse of confidential government information was kept hidden for so long.

A PwC-commissioned review by independent company director Ziggy Switkowski found the firm had a culture that tolerated poor behaviour of partners and fostered a “whatever it takes” approach.

Senior partners left the group earlier this year following the Tax Practitioners Board’s finding that former PwC partner Peter Collins shared confidential government information on tax reform, and the federal police launched an investigation into the matter.

Kevin Burrowes, who took over as PwC chief in July, said what happened was unacceptable, and that ultimate responsibility lay with previous chief executives.

PwC chief executive Kevin Burrowes said the firm’s previous conduct was unacceptable.Credit: Alex Eliinghausen

“We cannot apologise strongly enough for breaching the trust placed in us, and we accept the justifiable questions this matter raised about our trustworthiness and integrity just as we commit to do better in the future,” he said.

His comments were met with a sceptical response from the committee chair, Senator Richard Colbeck.

“On what basis can you say to us today that any of this is going to change?” he asked.

Senator Richard Colbeck at the Senate inquiry on Thursday.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

“I genuinely wonder how you believe that you can recover trust when all of the systems that you say that you have, all of the procedures that you say that you have, at a local and a global level, were ignored. They didn’t work,” Colbeck said.

Burrowes conceded that the scandal represented a failure of leadership by his predecessors, including Sayers. But he said there was nothing he could do about it.

“He is no longer with PwC, and so I have no ability to take any action against him,” Burrowes said of Sayers.

Pressed by Greens senator Barbara Pocock to evaluate the conduct of Sayers, Burrowes said responsibility ultimately ended with the person in charge.

“So I would say there’s many things that have gone wrong, and that’s been on the watch of Mr Sayers and [former CEO] Mr [Tom] Seymour. Therefore, I would conclude that they did not adequately execute their duties,” he said.

‘We cannot apologise strongly enough for breaching the trust placed in us,’

PwC boss Kevin Burrowes

But later in the hearing, Sayers said the recent report into the firm’s conduct was confronting reading and contained issues of which he was not aware. He also contradicted the Switkowski report, claiming that a bad culture was not the issue and said any blame for the scandal rested with a handful of tax partners.

“The new PwC investigation into these issues contains information not known to me when I was CEO,” he said.

“Most importantly, one, a number of PwC partners breached existing practices, policies and procedures; two, some tax partners breached their obligations of confidence; and three, the initial investigation into confidentiality breaches, which took place during my time, was flawed.”

However, he did concede he was ultimately responsible for breaches of confidence on his watch.

“The breaches of confidence and the failure to properly identify and address them happened on my watch, and I sincerely apologise.”

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