A Senate committee is calling on PwC to disclose the "names and positions" of the staff involved in its controversial tax leaks scandal.
It also said new clauses were needed in government contracts that explicitly require consulting firms to act in the public interest when they provide services to government.
The requests form part of 12 recommendations from a final report by a federal parliamentary committee that has investigated the federal government's use of private consulting services.
The inquiry was launched in the wake of the PwC tax leaks scandal in early 2023, where it was discovered the firm leaked sensitive Australian government information to large corporations, including Google.
"Australia's spending on consultancy services is proportionally greater than any other country," the final report said.
"In the past two decades the Australian government has relied increasingly on consultants to undertake work for the Australian Public Service (APS), with the bulk of work performed by the Big 4 consulting firms (Deloitte, EY, KPMG, and PwC).
"Increased use of consultants has limited the capability growth of the APS, given rise to occasions of serious conflict of interest, and been accompanied by questions about transparency.
"It has also resulted in enormous costs to the APS for work that is often opaque and, in some instances, raised genuine questions regarding value for money."
Other recommendations in the report include that a formal review be undertaken into the "legislative frameworks" and "structures of partnerships" in Australia, with a particular focus on partnerships in excess of 100 partners.
"The consulting sector has been operating in the shadows way too long," Labor Senator Deborah O'Neill told the ABC.
"Since this inquiry has commenced … on 15 February 2023, we found out so much more about the way these shadowy conglomerates are working in our Australian Public Service," she said.
However, in additional comments appended to the report, Greens senator Barbara Pocock was critical of the way in which the public service has been eroded in recent decades as Australian governments have become over-reliant on consultants, and said the recommendations in the report don't go far enough.
"They do not address the magnitude and scope of the problems this inquiry has uncovered," she argued.
"Specifically they do not address the issue of political donations by big consultants, the revolving door in and out of government, the inadequacy of penalties for PwC, the pressing need for structural reform to cap big partnerships' size, and to address conflicts of interest and the opaque nature of big partnerships."
Australian public service 'infiltrated' by consultants
In the report, Labor Senator Louise Pratt and her colleague Senator O'Neill said the committee documented the "wide range of ethical failures" in Australia's consulting sector.
They said the PwC tax leaks scandal, and the wave of ethical failures later exposed at other large consulting and audit firms, had "struck at the very core" of Australians' faith in the integrity of corporate Australia, and of the way in which such entities engage with government.
They said the scandals were a long time coming.
"The conditions for consultant infiltration of the Australian Public Service (APS) did not occur spontaneously, as the Abbott, Turnbull and Morrison Coalition governments instituted policies that directly undermined the APS, and by extension, the integrity and security of our government departments and information," they said in the report.
"The Coalition instituted an APS average staffing-level cap, which undermined the capacity of the APS to undertake even key government functions, and saw a dramatic increase of the use of consultants under Coalition governments.
"Australian government spending on consultants tripled between 2010 and 2020 to over $1 billion, and under the Morrison government in 2021-2022 the five largest consultancies amassed $2 billion in contracts," they said.
The report said the growth in expenditure on consultants had approximately trebled every decade for the past 30 years.
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2024-06-12 06:09:21Z
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