Australia's tax practitioners board has banned a PwC partner from practicing.
👉 Background: PwC aka Price Waterhouse Cooper, is the second largest professional services firm in the world by revenue... and the largest in Australia. PwC provides services to a whole range of organisations around Australia.
👉 What happened: In fact, PwC received $537 million in federal government contracts during the past two years alone. But now, Australia's tax practitioners board has banned a PwC partner from practicing - all because of sharing confidential government tax plans with other staff at the firm.
👉 What else: As a result, the PwC CEO and two other execs have stepped down after being on an email chain with this confidential info. And this raises a whole lot of questions about conflicts of interest in the professional services space.
💡Relationships between client and adviser are built on trust, expertise... more trust. And once this trust is broken, it becomes incredibly difficult to recover from.
💡In particular though, this leak highlights the strange and conflicted relationships that professional services firms often have with their broad range of clients.
💡We don’t see the same law firm or investment bank working on two opposing sides of a merger and acquisitions so now, the government will do an inquiry into the billions spent with consultants... and, who knows what else they'll uncover?
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