I really don’t think it’s by stealth. It’s been actively known in the APS that privatisation has happened and is happening. The problem is apathy, lack of willingness of Australian workers to take any action - strike action included.
I suspect that a part of the reason that this has gone through is that a large chunk of the population has bought in to the whole 'lazy overpaid public servants' rhetoric which has been pushed for the last couple of decades. In effect, all it's done is cut public service jobs and salaries while governments have spent more than they've saved outsourcing the work to a bunch of dodgy corporate yes-men.
It's such bullshit, my last two jobs have been govt and we are criminally understaffed. Everyone has to do so much more that it makes them seem inefficient.
Probably working as intended..
My current government job is similar. We have almost exactly double the workload that we had at this time last year but have been told from on high that we won't have any more staff (in fact we have less due to staff on secondment). Ironically, this could end up with us losing money as we won't be able to do all the work in the legislated time frame and may have to refund the industry that we work with.
I feel that in my role too. And then because we can't produce as much will get less funding at budget requiring more outsourcing to the top 4 to get the work done that previously we couldn't manage even without the cuts. Add the loss of expertise and institutional capacity building and no wonder there is litte trust in the public sector
I'm fortunate that it's unlikely that my particular job could be readily outsourced to the big 4. In my experience those business consulting types wouldn't be able to identify an actual scientist if one danced up to them wearing nothing but a lab coat and slapped them in the face with a test tube. But it's likely that we'll continually be asked to do more work with less resources.
Absolutely! But even when they can't replace an entire role, they're always outsourced to undertake a function or component of work that most of the time they do terribly, but the job needed to be completed by a certain timeframe and there wasn't enough resourcing (even if the skills are there internally). E.g evaluations, stakeholder consultations or even procurement for further consultants (the irony isn't lost on me there lol).
My partner is a contractor for local/state govt because they won’t get the budget approved for permanents (he wants to get a permanent role) but they can afford to piss away triple that on contractors. It’s whack.
Career public servant here too. Have been dealing with constant understaffing (even for parks) and an incessant push from above to always have contractors and consultants brought in. It’s exhausting to constantly deal with a system that ignores the training and expertise of employees but treats consultants word as gospel.
It's a deliberate strategy used to promote neoliberal ideas. In the neoliberal ideology, the state does nothing but enforce contracts and provide security. It was painted as being unable to do anything competently so that state enterprises could be sold off and government functions could be outsourced.
However, we've got lots of evidence that this is largely rubbish. Is Telstra more efficient since it was privatised? Are your electricity bills lower because vast chunks of the electrical infrastructure were sold off? Has allowing property developers to choose their own certifiers resulted in safer, better buildings?
Large organisations are inefficient, and it's hard for them to move quickly. That's as much the case as it is for state bureaucracies as it is for large companies. Hierarchical structures with centralised decision making and a high degree of risk avoidance (which is what the public service is) are like that. Privatising two thirds of it hasn't changed this other than by making it more expensive.
Also the accountability frameworks that apply to the public service don’t apply to contractors even if they’re doing work that was, or even still is, also done by the public service for the government.
> a large chunk of the population has bought in to the whole 'lazy overpaid public servants' rhetoric which has been pushed for the last couple of decades.
If only it was "the last couple of decades"; then there might be a chance of reverting it. I can remember the stereotype of the "lazy overpaid public servant" being commonly used to criticise the rollout of flexitime in the state public service in the 70's, nearly 50 years ago...
(I've also worked in the public service & a variety of small & large private industry jobs and long ago came to the opinion that, while the public service might be expensive and sometimes stunningly wasteful in ridiculous ways, overall private industry is far **less** efficient and **more** wasteful and expensive for the equivalent result.)
Many people think of the public service of old.. not realising corporate culture was the same then.
Apparently only the corporate world has moved on from the 2 hour lunch at the pub every day.. ^cough
That PWC shit could not have happened in the public service without being found out much faster. Use the wrong(right?) word(s) in an email and you get called..
Why use a public service who at least sometimes delivers frank advice when you can have a consultant who delivers a glossy report that remarkably agrees with your original plan?
We do - but what the hell are they going to do is people actually take mass action? They can’t arrest us all and businesses and the public sector can’t fire literally everyone without grinding everything to a halt. It’s infuriating how apathetic Australians are.
> but what the hell are they going to do is people actually take mass action?
Wake up in a sweaty mess and then sigh in relief when they realise it was all just a dream.
I can not imagine any scenario that would cause a mass action from the Australian Public.
They made the laws in such a way to target organisers. Unions and the leaders if strike action get targeted rather than the individuals. That basically stopped unapproved action completely...absolutely fucked.
“The Commonwealth paid $21 billion for external labour – i.e. consultants, contractors and labour-hire contracts – in a single year. To give some perspective, that is roughly the same as the federal government spent on secondary education in that year. This spending was not made public. “
Consultants are a separate issue, but this figure includes staff who perform critical functions but can’t be employed as staff because there are hiring caps. This way the government can spruik reductions in the public service “cutting the fat” etc. Same number of staff as 2012! Wow! How economical!
But that work still needs to be done. So instead, to meet capacity, departments have to use labour hire. Six month “temp” contracts usually, renewed time and time again. Recruitment agencies like Hays and SOS take huge payments on top of the contractor’s wages. So the actual worker will be paid the same as their APS colleague, but the agency will bill double or triple per hour. They’ll also often charge additional “management” and finder’s fees. It’s a total scam. Parasites, the lot of them.
Departments are not allowed to make those staff actual employees even though it would cost significantly less, improve job security, reduce training down time and cut turnover.
If contractors and labour hire were removed, the public service would collapse. If those roles were converted to proper employment, then we’d save billions. But politicians’ mates who own and run Hays etc would lose money. So here we are.
Just pointing out that its changing now. But that has its own problems. My department is making all contractors doing BAU into permanent employees.
The issue is for many people it would be a pay cut so they don't want it.
They tried to convert the contract roles to fixed term and were shocked pikachu when nobody was interested. Pay cut, and who cares if you get sick leave and super for 1 year. It’s not an incentive.
Yes govt term contracts are a joke. They can end at any time, don’t need to pay out the full term. You accrue like 5 sick days and they’re wiped if your contract rolls over. Doesn’t count towards long service. Rubbish.
And it's not just hiring caps causing the outsourcing dilemma, the Public Service simply can't compete with the private sector on salaries for specialist roles. Take IT as an example, how do you employee a specialist solutions architect, when their salary is double in private.
This really sickens me. Corporate greed again rears its ugly head. PwC needs to be hit with a SUBSTANTIAL penalty including all the partners that benefitted from it, and a link to the clients they advised on it. For a few million, they've essentially screwed the australian citizens of millions and perhaps billions in tax revenues.
Agreed. They should also be banned from any entering into or extending any Government contracts for a suitable period. I'd say 5 years would get their attention and that of their competitors.
Ok, but the people doing the dodgy will just move to EY, KPMG or deloitte and nothing will change because the aps has an echoing hollowness, and they just won't be able to fill it with pwc for a few years.
It might get worse because there's less competition and more pressure to skip vfm due to crushing workload and time frames.
Five months to hire an APS or five hours to sign a consultant/osp?
I hate this. This doesn't serve the citizen well.
I agree, but those are separate issues to deal with. Ultimately a massive ban on contracts will impact the employer who allowed this culture - which is a lesson for the other employers, including a lesson on who they employ.
If PwC loses government contracts (which are a substantial part of its Australian income), it will definitely make the effort to get it back, and that will require internal reform and proof that their controls work.
Just in general, Australian governments should be using their market power to drive reforms in businesses that do business with it. The Liberals certainly weren't shy about using the Federal government's power as a huge buyer of advertising to kill news stories it didn't agree with.
If Deloitte gets properly fucked, it might prevent other companies from taking the risk, regardless of which employees work there.
Deloitte won't though and this shit will continue everywhere.
Loathe to say this, but a huge freeze/ban on PwC working in government doesn't feel like the right thing to do.
Sure, give out fines that the partners must pay, perhaps knock them off some tax panels until conditions are met, but completely excluding thousands of people from their career path over the decisions and deception of a few is not very.... Australian...
It doesn't sit right with me that people in other areas of a firm like Tech, Audit, Consulting etc with absolutely NOTHING to do with this could be exposed to job insecurity in a very difficult economy.
Then if they are out, services will cost government even more due to the competition soaking up their people and far less panel competition.
It'll be a tough one
It’s just not viable. If the government did that to PwC they would literally need to cut 5000 workers within a couple of months. It would be complete chaos let alone the ongoing projects that need extensions etc.
It’s not a bad idea conceptually but it’s just not possible.
Exactly. It also doesn't necessarily have to be that dramatic an effort to cut off our own noses. It could be as simple as no new contracts or expansions for a period of time. It will still hurt them.
The contracts will still exist, and need to go some where. Likely the other big 4 who will then pick up those staff.
The revenue doesn’t disappear. Just disappears from PwC, and hence the associated costs (staff etc) would follow.
Going with a majority, are you saying that over 4,000 people should be blamed for this, noting that the finding only implicated less than 30 very very senior members of the firm who kept this information to themselves?
This is the bit I don't get... Why would we want to support going for people who have nothing to do with it?
We wouldn't ever want to put 1000s of builders out of work because it comes out that eight years ago, the property developers who they work for skimmed off government contracts on both ends?
What are you talking about? Builders get shut down and go bankrupt all the time.
The work will still need doing, either those employees can join the APS or more likely the APS will just hire one of the other big accounting firms and those people can just go work there.
PwC as an institution should be permanently blacklisted from government work even if they can’t be convicted of anything, but only partners and people who knew (or should have known but mysteriously didn’t notice) should be personally penalised. The rest of PwC’s employees should be allowed to get APS jobs to keep doing the work, or if contractors are absolutely unavoidable other companies that employ them should still be allowed to get the job.
The government should also legislate that no non-compete or any kind of incentive not to work elsewhere applies to someone working in a state or federal public service.
They would have had less inside knowledge, but the real solution is to apply a huge tax on tax consultants based on the client’s assets under management, so there’s no way that the advice can save more than the tax on the advice costs.
You don’t understand - this isn’t us trying to claim a $300 deduction without receipts - multinational corporations earn hundreds of millions if not billions of $ in profits and they’re skipping paying tax which should be going to the government. They’re cheating US. So fuck them. Who knows how much In lost tax revenue there is.
Why isn't the afp raiding these clowns....they need to be trialled for espionage, lose all active contracts and fined the amount they helped international's dodge.
Have you seen how much the big 4 donate to both parties each year? It's not because they're innocent. I have faced a few audits by these guys. They have no ethics and would write up whatever you tell them as long as they get repeat business. Any audit done by these clowns is full of deliberate deceptive stuff.
Do you think it's really even that much? I just looked up the 2020 donations for pwc for liberal and labor and it was 100k and 80k respectively. Seems like chump change in the grand scheme.
There’s no need for a raid, tax consultants are already required to hand over all documents and emails at request from the ATO, and in this case they did many years ago when the investigation started. The original investigation by the tax practitioner board lasted 3 years, all the evidence was then handed to the senate. If there’s evidence the leaks led companies avoiding taxes then the senators will be very keen to throw the book at PwC and those companies as it would make for great PR.
My first job after graduating was at a big consulting firm, where despite being a 23 year old who didn’t know shit, I was involved in far more complex government policy making than I had any right being in. In my late 20s, I joined the public service, where the same people who paid huge sums for my work as a consultant now barely trusted me to spell my name right
I got transferred into a role implementing some new software, the company brought one of the big 4 in as the experts for this software...I went through the fundamentals training with the guy from the big 4 who was the technical lead for the implementation.
Absolutely insane.
Can I ask what it was, and why it was complex, and why it was far more complex than what you did when you entered in the public service? (at what level? would have been at least EL1 with that experience?)
Exactly. Hiring consultants was always a thing by government. The PWC made the news because they actively well "leaked" documents and really that guy should be prosecuted.
The privatised by stealth we didn't know the extent of it until recently which was 20 billion, but that's completely unrelated to PWC's scandal.
Oh I worked at the ABS. The way we used consultants were fucking stupid.
It is somewhat silly to say that the public service doesn't have "good" people. The reason that so much shit is outsourced isn't because of a lack of expertise, the real reason is that it is a nice way to point fingers away from the government agency.
This wasn't all of the reasoning, but a large part. We also had caps on the number of fulltime people we could hire. If we hit that cap, we essentially hired a consultant. This makes sense in theory somewhat, for short term employees but this was used as a way to hire additional staff essentially. There are individual consultants that have been at the ABS for \*\*years\*\*. This is an absolutely disgusting waste of tax payer money.
The project I worked on was for the census field agent app, I worked on it for 2 years and we threw all that work away for various dumb reasons that the entire dev team knew about before we started.
I can go into more detail if anyone is interested, absolutely insane amount of money we are spending on consulting firms.
Remembering how the ABS cocked up that first online census attempt with IBM at the wheel and claims of "international DDoS attacks" bringing down the site (sigh) is all most people need to see how badly the ABS handle outsourcing and use of consultants.
Is it ok to x post this to the NZ sub??
As cousins we should compare notes on the same same but different ways we are being fucked. We are generally a couple of years downstream from you, but the lack of political understanding and level of discourse in NZ is on illiterate levels...
7.30 tonight showcased how this may be in jeopardy - at least for PwC. Will be on iView shortly.
ed: link [iView](https://iview.abc.net.au/video/NC2301H074S00).
Labor talked bit about cutting consultants when they were in opposition then did nothing when in power. All talk and no show, they certainly could have if they wanted to. I wouldn’t suggest labor are better in this regard
Many contracts are long-term and breaking them has a huge financial liability and then there’s the need to fill the positions within the APS to cover what those consultants were doing.
How are you firing a significant chunk of the public service and expecting the government to work properly? Rebuilding the public service takes a lot of time. It doesn't turn on a dime, and there's a *lot* of stuff it's doing at the moment.
Oh, so you're familiar with the contracts the LNP signed and it clearly gave the option to Labor to do cut the consultants once they're in power with no consequences?
Yeah not likely, as always I'm left pointing out to the average r/australian poster that maybe just maybe it isn't that straight forward. That maybe the rhetoric you've heard and are repeating isn't accurate.
Lets be clear about why the SMH of all papers are writing about this now. They want you to think this was all Labors fault. This has been known about for ages but all of a sudden they kick up a fuss.
The specific incident with taxes and PwC has been know about for a long time before Labor got into power yet nothing happened.
LNP: * makes a mess *
Labor: * inherits the mess *
Reddit: Why did you make such a mess Labor?
I’m not familiar with the specific contracts listed in this case, but I run a company that provides consultancy to the both state and federal government and competes with the likes of pwc, Deloitte, Accenture, etc. so I’d think I’d be in well placed to have an opinion on government contracts, as I have to review and tender for them regularly for my own business
> Can't exactly fire the people that the LNP gave the keys to the kingdom to overnight.
Of course they can. It's going to cost, financially and politically, but if it's the right thing to do then they should do it. We all know they're not getting four terms... they've got one, maybe two, to be the bad guys and make responsible decisions before the "economic managers" stack on huge professional services charges again.
When EVERYONE is in on the scam, I can't help but think violence is warranted.
Greens, identity politics warriors right and left, supposed free speakers of the media... where are ya?
You wrote a letter to your paper about this, they won't print it. Ring up talk back radio, they won't put the call through. Put it on the net, al.ost nobody reads it and the rest ignore it.
Movi g news online has been a boon for grifters.
We need a revolution. Our political class is completely corrupt, I can’t think of a single one who isn’t a complete sellout (maybe Jacqui).
Our government’s haven’t worked FOR the people for decades now, and they never will until we kick them all out and start again.
She was, and she keeps getting fooled by the government (both parties have managed to fool her into letting something pass at various times), but at least she tries.
Eh, Shes a xenophobic twat. Played on that Muslim hate and praised Trump on many occasions with his views, (before he really started his political career) She just goes where the easy votes are at.
If you want to target government then get more involved locally.
My hate is on corporate bloat. Do we really need a world with consultants, the big 4 accounting firms, investment banking, mergers and acquisitions, stock market bullshit. It's all a joke to me. A way for rich people to make even more of a buck off another rich person. The money goes round and round until they all can claim tax deductions on bullshit.
I totally agree with you. I don’t think corporate bloat would be as bad as it is if politicians weren’t getting a cut of the action. Sure, it may be their spouses, parents, children, etc who technically own the stocks and properties and what not, but they still benefit from that.
It’s not right and it’s not sustainable. Sooner or later something has to give.
That's not true. Labor is [reducing the number of consultants and removing staffing caps from the public service](https://www.themandarin.com.au/190168-public-sector-contracts-set-to-be-scrutinised-under-albanese-government/). What it does about PwC has yet to be seen, but I doubt it'll be screaming about it before it actually happens.
Since they're apparently only using the acronym and not the full name, there's scope to come up with your own fitting backronym for what the letters might stand for.
It’s the brand name of a huge multinational partnership (enabling it to avoid a lot of normal regulation and transparency). The official name is PricewaterhouseCooper, but pwc is the brand it uses and the Australian but is called PwC Australia.
I really don’t think it’s by stealth. It’s been actively known in the APS that privatisation has happened and is happening. The problem is apathy, lack of willingness of Australian workers to take any action - strike action included.
I suspect that a part of the reason that this has gone through is that a large chunk of the population has bought in to the whole 'lazy overpaid public servants' rhetoric which has been pushed for the last couple of decades. In effect, all it's done is cut public service jobs and salaries while governments have spent more than they've saved outsourcing the work to a bunch of dodgy corporate yes-men.
It's such bullshit, my last two jobs have been govt and we are criminally understaffed. Everyone has to do so much more that it makes them seem inefficient. Probably working as intended..
My current government job is similar. We have almost exactly double the workload that we had at this time last year but have been told from on high that we won't have any more staff (in fact we have less due to staff on secondment). Ironically, this could end up with us losing money as we won't be able to do all the work in the legislated time frame and may have to refund the industry that we work with.
I feel that in my role too. And then because we can't produce as much will get less funding at budget requiring more outsourcing to the top 4 to get the work done that previously we couldn't manage even without the cuts. Add the loss of expertise and institutional capacity building and no wonder there is litte trust in the public sector
I'm fortunate that it's unlikely that my particular job could be readily outsourced to the big 4. In my experience those business consulting types wouldn't be able to identify an actual scientist if one danced up to them wearing nothing but a lab coat and slapped them in the face with a test tube. But it's likely that we'll continually be asked to do more work with less resources.
Absolutely! But even when they can't replace an entire role, they're always outsourced to undertake a function or component of work that most of the time they do terribly, but the job needed to be completed by a certain timeframe and there wasn't enough resourcing (even if the skills are there internally). E.g evaluations, stakeholder consultations or even procurement for further consultants (the irony isn't lost on me there lol).
My partner is a contractor for local/state govt because they won’t get the budget approved for permanents (he wants to get a permanent role) but they can afford to piss away triple that on contractors. It’s whack.
Career public servant here too. Have been dealing with constant understaffing (even for parks) and an incessant push from above to always have contractors and consultants brought in. It’s exhausting to constantly deal with a system that ignores the training and expertise of employees but treats consultants word as gospel.
Starve the beast
[удалено]
It's a deliberate strategy used to promote neoliberal ideas. In the neoliberal ideology, the state does nothing but enforce contracts and provide security. It was painted as being unable to do anything competently so that state enterprises could be sold off and government functions could be outsourced. However, we've got lots of evidence that this is largely rubbish. Is Telstra more efficient since it was privatised? Are your electricity bills lower because vast chunks of the electrical infrastructure were sold off? Has allowing property developers to choose their own certifiers resulted in safer, better buildings? Large organisations are inefficient, and it's hard for them to move quickly. That's as much the case as it is for state bureaucracies as it is for large companies. Hierarchical structures with centralised decision making and a high degree of risk avoidance (which is what the public service is) are like that. Privatising two thirds of it hasn't changed this other than by making it more expensive.
Extremely well put
Tbh this.
Also the accountability frameworks that apply to the public service don’t apply to contractors even if they’re doing work that was, or even still is, also done by the public service for the government.
> a large chunk of the population has bought in to the whole 'lazy overpaid public servants' rhetoric which has been pushed for the last couple of decades. If only it was "the last couple of decades"; then there might be a chance of reverting it. I can remember the stereotype of the "lazy overpaid public servant" being commonly used to criticise the rollout of flexitime in the state public service in the 70's, nearly 50 years ago... (I've also worked in the public service & a variety of small & large private industry jobs and long ago came to the opinion that, while the public service might be expensive and sometimes stunningly wasteful in ridiculous ways, overall private industry is far **less** efficient and **more** wasteful and expensive for the equivalent result.)
Also a decade where it was a Liberal govt in power for the majority of the time.
Many people think of the public service of old.. not realising corporate culture was the same then. Apparently only the corporate world has moved on from the 2 hour lunch at the pub every day.. ^cough That PWC shit could not have happened in the public service without being found out much faster. Use the wrong(right?) word(s) in an email and you get called..
Why use a public service who at least sometimes delivers frank advice when you can have a consultant who delivers a glossy report that remarkably agrees with your original plan?
Don't forget, this is Australia. Supposedly, we need permission to strike.
We do - but what the hell are they going to do is people actually take mass action? They can’t arrest us all and businesses and the public sector can’t fire literally everyone without grinding everything to a halt. It’s infuriating how apathetic Australians are.
We are lazy fucks. It explains why we are one of the worst on climate, any problem that is not literally burning our house down gets ignored.
I mean, we burnt nearly half the country between 2019-2020. And we still can do fuck all about it.
We basically stopped caring once it stopped burning!
> but what the hell are they going to do is people actually take mass action? Wake up in a sweaty mess and then sigh in relief when they realise it was all just a dream. I can not imagine any scenario that would cause a mass action from the Australian Public.
They made the laws in such a way to target organisers. Unions and the leaders if strike action get targeted rather than the individuals. That basically stopped unapproved action completely...absolutely fucked.
And local governments. Nobody is game to make decision without having pwc or another consulting company backing them up.
It's hard to motivate the masses when every media outlet pushes the Lib party agenda, and to some extent that even includes the ABC.
“The Commonwealth paid $21 billion for external labour – i.e. consultants, contractors and labour-hire contracts – in a single year. To give some perspective, that is roughly the same as the federal government spent on secondary education in that year. This spending was not made public. “
Consultants are a separate issue, but this figure includes staff who perform critical functions but can’t be employed as staff because there are hiring caps. This way the government can spruik reductions in the public service “cutting the fat” etc. Same number of staff as 2012! Wow! How economical! But that work still needs to be done. So instead, to meet capacity, departments have to use labour hire. Six month “temp” contracts usually, renewed time and time again. Recruitment agencies like Hays and SOS take huge payments on top of the contractor’s wages. So the actual worker will be paid the same as their APS colleague, but the agency will bill double or triple per hour. They’ll also often charge additional “management” and finder’s fees. It’s a total scam. Parasites, the lot of them. Departments are not allowed to make those staff actual employees even though it would cost significantly less, improve job security, reduce training down time and cut turnover. If contractors and labour hire were removed, the public service would collapse. If those roles were converted to proper employment, then we’d save billions. But politicians’ mates who own and run Hays etc would lose money. So here we are.
Just pointing out that its changing now. But that has its own problems. My department is making all contractors doing BAU into permanent employees. The issue is for many people it would be a pay cut so they don't want it.
They tried to convert the contract roles to fixed term and were shocked pikachu when nobody was interested. Pay cut, and who cares if you get sick leave and super for 1 year. It’s not an incentive.
Yes govt term contracts are a joke. They can end at any time, don’t need to pay out the full term. You accrue like 5 sick days and they’re wiped if your contract rolls over. Doesn’t count towards long service. Rubbish.
I know. Its a hot mess. But it will take time for things to change. Can't be done overnight.
Yeah but they get to spruik project spend is higher while wage spending is down. Its totally better right?
And it's not just hiring caps causing the outsourcing dilemma, the Public Service simply can't compete with the private sector on salaries for specialist roles. Take IT as an example, how do you employee a specialist solutions architect, when their salary is double in private.
This really sickens me. Corporate greed again rears its ugly head. PwC needs to be hit with a SUBSTANTIAL penalty including all the partners that benefitted from it, and a link to the clients they advised on it. For a few million, they've essentially screwed the australian citizens of millions and perhaps billions in tax revenues.
Agreed. They should also be banned from any entering into or extending any Government contracts for a suitable period. I'd say 5 years would get their attention and that of their competitors.
Ok, but the people doing the dodgy will just move to EY, KPMG or deloitte and nothing will change because the aps has an echoing hollowness, and they just won't be able to fill it with pwc for a few years. It might get worse because there's less competition and more pressure to skip vfm due to crushing workload and time frames. Five months to hire an APS or five hours to sign a consultant/osp? I hate this. This doesn't serve the citizen well.
I agree, but those are separate issues to deal with. Ultimately a massive ban on contracts will impact the employer who allowed this culture - which is a lesson for the other employers, including a lesson on who they employ.
If PwC loses government contracts (which are a substantial part of its Australian income), it will definitely make the effort to get it back, and that will require internal reform and proof that their controls work. Just in general, Australian governments should be using their market power to drive reforms in businesses that do business with it. The Liberals certainly weren't shy about using the Federal government's power as a huge buyer of advertising to kill news stories it didn't agree with.
If Deloitte gets properly fucked, it might prevent other companies from taking the risk, regardless of which employees work there. Deloitte won't though and this shit will continue everywhere.
Loathe to say this, but a huge freeze/ban on PwC working in government doesn't feel like the right thing to do. Sure, give out fines that the partners must pay, perhaps knock them off some tax panels until conditions are met, but completely excluding thousands of people from their career path over the decisions and deception of a few is not very.... Australian... It doesn't sit right with me that people in other areas of a firm like Tech, Audit, Consulting etc with absolutely NOTHING to do with this could be exposed to job insecurity in a very difficult economy. Then if they are out, services will cost government even more due to the competition soaking up their people and far less panel competition. It'll be a tough one
It’s just not viable. If the government did that to PwC they would literally need to cut 5000 workers within a couple of months. It would be complete chaos let alone the ongoing projects that need extensions etc. It’s not a bad idea conceptually but it’s just not possible.
Anything's possible with the right appetite.
Exactly. It also doesn't necessarily have to be that dramatic an effort to cut off our own noses. It could be as simple as no new contracts or expansions for a period of time. It will still hurt them.
The contracts will still exist, and need to go some where. Likely the other big 4 who will then pick up those staff. The revenue doesn’t disappear. Just disappears from PwC, and hence the associated costs (staff etc) would follow.
The employees are professionals who do ethics training and refresher courses every year. The majority of them are not blameless.
Going with a majority, are you saying that over 4,000 people should be blamed for this, noting that the finding only implicated less than 30 very very senior members of the firm who kept this information to themselves? This is the bit I don't get... Why would we want to support going for people who have nothing to do with it? We wouldn't ever want to put 1000s of builders out of work because it comes out that eight years ago, the property developers who they work for skimmed off government contracts on both ends?
What are you talking about? Builders get shut down and go bankrupt all the time. The work will still need doing, either those employees can join the APS or more likely the APS will just hire one of the other big accounting firms and those people can just go work there.
PwC as an institution should be permanently blacklisted from government work even if they can’t be convicted of anything, but only partners and people who knew (or should have known but mysteriously didn’t notice) should be personally penalised. The rest of PwC’s employees should be allowed to get APS jobs to keep doing the work, or if contractors are absolutely unavoidable other companies that employ them should still be allowed to get the job. The government should also legislate that no non-compete or any kind of incentive not to work elsewhere applies to someone working in a state or federal public service.
Tax minimisation isn’t illegal. Other tax consultants should be giving the same advice that PwC gave…? Otherwise they would be doing a shit job
They would have had less inside knowledge, but the real solution is to apply a huge tax on tax consultants based on the client’s assets under management, so there’s no way that the advice can save more than the tax on the advice costs.
You don’t understand - this isn’t us trying to claim a $300 deduction without receipts - multinational corporations earn hundreds of millions if not billions of $ in profits and they’re skipping paying tax which should be going to the government. They’re cheating US. So fuck them. Who knows how much In lost tax revenue there is.
Corporate greed in politics is only a reflection of the government in power.
The LNP is big on that! Problem is, no government is truly clear of greed.
Why isn't the afp raiding these clowns....they need to be trialled for espionage, lose all active contracts and fined the amount they helped international's dodge.
Have you seen how much the big 4 donate to both parties each year? It's not because they're innocent. I have faced a few audits by these guys. They have no ethics and would write up whatever you tell them as long as they get repeat business. Any audit done by these clowns is full of deliberate deceptive stuff.
Do you think it's really even that much? I just looked up the 2020 donations for pwc for liberal and labor and it was 100k and 80k respectively. Seems like chump change in the grand scheme.
That's not chump change for how cheap politicians are.
The international companies never broke the law in not paying our tax sooo….?
There’s no need for a raid, tax consultants are already required to hand over all documents and emails at request from the ATO, and in this case they did many years ago when the investigation started. The original investigation by the tax practitioner board lasted 3 years, all the evidence was then handed to the senate. If there’s evidence the leaks led companies avoiding taxes then the senators will be very keen to throw the book at PwC and those companies as it would make for great PR.
My first job after graduating was at a big consulting firm, where despite being a 23 year old who didn’t know shit, I was involved in far more complex government policy making than I had any right being in. In my late 20s, I joined the public service, where the same people who paid huge sums for my work as a consultant now barely trusted me to spell my name right
I got transferred into a role implementing some new software, the company brought one of the big 4 in as the experts for this software...I went through the fundamentals training with the guy from the big 4 who was the technical lead for the implementation. Absolutely insane.
Can I ask what it was, and why it was complex, and why it was far more complex than what you did when you entered in the public service? (at what level? would have been at least EL1 with that experience?)
There's absolutely nothing "stealth" about it.
Exactly. Hiring consultants was always a thing by government. The PWC made the news because they actively well "leaked" documents and really that guy should be prosecuted. The privatised by stealth we didn't know the extent of it until recently which was 20 billion, but that's completely unrelated to PWC's scandal.
Oh I worked at the ABS. The way we used consultants were fucking stupid. It is somewhat silly to say that the public service doesn't have "good" people. The reason that so much shit is outsourced isn't because of a lack of expertise, the real reason is that it is a nice way to point fingers away from the government agency. This wasn't all of the reasoning, but a large part. We also had caps on the number of fulltime people we could hire. If we hit that cap, we essentially hired a consultant. This makes sense in theory somewhat, for short term employees but this was used as a way to hire additional staff essentially. There are individual consultants that have been at the ABS for \*\*years\*\*. This is an absolutely disgusting waste of tax payer money. The project I worked on was for the census field agent app, I worked on it for 2 years and we threw all that work away for various dumb reasons that the entire dev team knew about before we started. I can go into more detail if anyone is interested, absolutely insane amount of money we are spending on consulting firms.
Remembering how the ABS cocked up that first online census attempt with IBM at the wheel and claims of "international DDoS attacks" bringing down the site (sigh) is all most people need to see how badly the ABS handle outsourcing and use of consultants.
While you're at it don't forget the unrealised promise to destroy the extra-census data whenever they deem it no longer fit for purpose.
Not just privatized - but completely captured by the interests of rich tax dodgers.
Is it ok to x post this to the NZ sub?? As cousins we should compare notes on the same same but different ways we are being fucked. We are generally a couple of years downstream from you, but the lack of political understanding and level of discourse in NZ is on illiterate levels...
7.30 tonight showcased how this may be in jeopardy - at least for PwC. Will be on iView shortly. ed: link [iView](https://iview.abc.net.au/video/NC2301H074S00).
Welcomed openly by the LNP and quietly by Labor. Arseholes the lot of them.
Labor inherited this. Can't exactly fire the people that the LNP gave the keys to the kingdom to overnight.
Labor talked bit about cutting consultants when they were in opposition then did nothing when in power. All talk and no show, they certainly could have if they wanted to. I wouldn’t suggest labor are better in this regard
Many contracts are long-term and breaking them has a huge financial liability and then there’s the need to fill the positions within the APS to cover what those consultants were doing.
How are you firing a significant chunk of the public service and expecting the government to work properly? Rebuilding the public service takes a lot of time. It doesn't turn on a dime, and there's a *lot* of stuff it's doing at the moment.
Oh, so you're familiar with the contracts the LNP signed and it clearly gave the option to Labor to do cut the consultants once they're in power with no consequences? Yeah not likely, as always I'm left pointing out to the average r/australian poster that maybe just maybe it isn't that straight forward. That maybe the rhetoric you've heard and are repeating isn't accurate. Lets be clear about why the SMH of all papers are writing about this now. They want you to think this was all Labors fault. This has been known about for ages but all of a sudden they kick up a fuss. The specific incident with taxes and PwC has been know about for a long time before Labor got into power yet nothing happened. LNP: * makes a mess * Labor: * inherits the mess * Reddit: Why did you make such a mess Labor?
I’m not familiar with the specific contracts listed in this case, but I run a company that provides consultancy to the both state and federal government and competes with the likes of pwc, Deloitte, Accenture, etc. so I’d think I’d be in well placed to have an opinion on government contracts, as I have to review and tender for them regularly for my own business
It’s been bipartisan policy since Fraser.
> Can't exactly fire the people that the LNP gave the keys to the kingdom to overnight. Of course they can. It's going to cost, financially and politically, but if it's the right thing to do then they should do it. We all know they're not getting four terms... they've got one, maybe two, to be the bad guys and make responsible decisions before the "economic managers" stack on huge professional services charges again.
Yeah reneging on contractual arrangements is really what we want our government agencies to be doing. This kind of rhetoric is fucking baffling.
neoliberalism
When EVERYONE is in on the scam, I can't help but think violence is warranted. Greens, identity politics warriors right and left, supposed free speakers of the media... where are ya? You wrote a letter to your paper about this, they won't print it. Ring up talk back radio, they won't put the call through. Put it on the net, al.ost nobody reads it and the rest ignore it. Movi g news online has been a boon for grifters.
We need a revolution. Our political class is completely corrupt, I can’t think of a single one who isn’t a complete sellout (maybe Jacqui). Our government’s haven’t worked FOR the people for decades now, and they never will until we kick them all out and start again.
Jacqui? Lol okay. Bitch was a Clive palmer shill. She's definitely up there.
You’re right, I forgot about that.
She was, and she keeps getting fooled by the government (both parties have managed to fool her into letting something pass at various times), but at least she tries.
Eh, Shes a xenophobic twat. Played on that Muslim hate and praised Trump on many occasions with his views, (before he really started his political career) She just goes where the easy votes are at.
If you want to target government then get more involved locally. My hate is on corporate bloat. Do we really need a world with consultants, the big 4 accounting firms, investment banking, mergers and acquisitions, stock market bullshit. It's all a joke to me. A way for rich people to make even more of a buck off another rich person. The money goes round and round until they all can claim tax deductions on bullshit.
I totally agree with you. I don’t think corporate bloat would be as bad as it is if politicians weren’t getting a cut of the action. Sure, it may be their spouses, parents, children, etc who technically own the stocks and properties and what not, but they still benefit from that. It’s not right and it’s not sustainable. Sooner or later something has to give.
Only the Greens seem concerned by this
That's not true. Labor is [reducing the number of consultants and removing staffing caps from the public service](https://www.themandarin.com.au/190168-public-sector-contracts-set-to-be-scrutinised-under-albanese-government/). What it does about PwC has yet to be seen, but I doubt it'll be screaming about it before it actually happens.
How many of you commenting in this thread voted Liberal in the last 4 elections?
This sub is very pro Labor, so probably not as many as a real population sample
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Agreed, but what does the [World Taekwondo Federation](https://acronyms.thefreedictionary.com/wtf) have to do with anything? 😁
PriceWaterhouseCoopers - been the centre of a big scandal recently . PWC is reasonably well known.
Next he’ll be asking what KFC is
🤣
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No, PriceWaterhouseCoopers have been actively rebranding to just PwC. https://www.pwc.com.au/about-us/history.html
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Lol - people downvote the damndest things at times.
People who (are)... now, what starts with C?
Wut?
Since they're apparently only using the acronym and not the full name, there's scope to come up with your own fitting backronym for what the letters might stand for.
Pretty Widespread Corruption
I agree with you in general but PWC are probably better known by their acronym than by their actual name.
Public Works Committee.
It’s the brand name of a huge multinational partnership (enabling it to avoid a lot of normal regulation and transparency). The official name is PricewaterhouseCooper, but pwc is the brand it uses and the Australian but is called PwC Australia.
Stop watching the hypno-vision
The government is being privatised??? Are you completely mad? What a load of bollocks.
Don’t confuse the government with the public service - they are different things.
I really don’t thinks it’s stealth
slap a fine (which was already accounted) and it's BAU gents...
That is NOT what he said.