During the dedicated parliamentary inquiry into KPMG Australia’s ethics and professional accountability on 19 June, former national managing partner of audit assurance Julian McPherson admitted that he went straight to HR upon his discovery of the whistleblower complaint.
Committee chair Senator Deborah O’Neill, who initially told the committee of the whistleblower’s allegations against the firm, said: “I’m a little shocked that the first person you went to was human resources, which is often, people know, a way of managing people with a problem … you looked at this and you went, oh, this guy’s a problem.”
“When I’m looking at this and going, our culture’s a problem.”
O’Neill suggested that McPherson had not given priority to the whistleblower’s allegations or their communication, criticising his framing of the issue as an “HR problem” and not giving it the required urgency.
She asked: “How long after you got what was just read into the record, did it take you to get to the door of your senior partner, entitled the CEO, and tell him these are serious matters of ethics, integrity and culture, you need to be aware of this?”
“Days, weeks, or months”?
McPherson claimed multiple times that he could not recollect when he translated the information to former KPMG chief executive Andrew Yates.
O’Neill said: “I guess I want to say, if that letter arrived, what most Australians would go, it would be, this is way beyond the pale, we’ve got an emergency here, I need to ring every...
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