KPMG is facing international intervention as its chief executive resigns and legal loopholes limit ASIC’s access to documents and capacity to penalise the company.
Six years ago, Brendan Lyon blew the whistle on conflicts of interest and a potential multibillion-dollar hole in the New South Wales state budget while working at KPMG.
Five people directly involved in the case were later promoted at KPMG. One of them, Andrew Yates, was forced to step down immediately as chief executive on May 29 over a different scandal.
“You can’t say the circus is different when the clowns are the same,” Lyon, who is now a professor at the University of Wollongong, tells The Saturday Paper.
“The organisation, when I was there, was amoral. All of the people who refused to change that amorality became very senior leadership, partially off the back of all of the money they got in profit from those kind of exercises.”
KPMG is now facing intervention by its powerful international governing body after new allegations of conflicts of interest and corporate misconduct were made in parliament.
The scandal has put at risk strategically important work KPMG does auditing the books of some of Australia’s top companies. It raises further questions about the extraordinarily lucrative stream of government and university consulting work enjoyed by the accounting giants and the legal loophole it and the other big firms use to avoid scrutiny by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission.
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