👉 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.

What's the key learning?

💡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.

• On one hand, these firms work for the government to help formulate tax laws.
• On the other hand, the same people are often working with corporates and trying to help them pay as little tax as legally possible.
  

💡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?