Bernard Lagan: The curse of consultants

OPINION: Years ago, when I wrote for the Sydney Morning Herald, the rattled chiefs of that publishing empire called in global consultants McKinsey. The emerging internet threatened readers and advertising. The McKinsey chaps hung blank paper on the Herald’s newsroom walls and called for ideas.

The ones they most earnestly scribbled out involved cost-cutting – rather than more adaptive journalism from the paper’s writers, reclassified as “content providers” by our Fairfax publishing chief executive, himself a former McKinsey boss.

He later left with a A$4.5 million payout. Fairfax lost much of its advertising to more agile internet start-ups – eventually shedding 1900 jobs. Before the chief executive walked, I was marched out, having hacked his email because I was worried about where he was leading us. It wasn’t hard, the ex-McKinsey chief’s password was, er, password.

Though I regretted my actions, big-name consultants, I learnt, are capable of lapses.

Cunning maybe – and, as a scandal rocking corporate Australia reveals, some cheat.

PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) is among The Big Four of the globe’s largest professional services networks, organisations that peddle accounting, tax advice, legal and other services to corporations.

PwC’s Sydney headquarters are in harbourside offices from where the firm oversees its 800 Australian partners who last year had “target incomes” of between A$340,000 and $3.7 million.

Its Australian website reminds readers: “We are committed to strong governance, oversight and accountability, with a clear tone from the top on the behaviour we expect from our people.”

Here’s the reality: a cache of PwC internal emails released in early May by the Australian parliament shows how the firm cheated itself into millions in fees by advising global tech companies how to sidestep the country’s new multinational tax-avoidance laws.