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The former KPMG executive who revealed allegations that senior staff at the firm had used confidential material from major companies to win work says speaking out has had devastating consequences.
In documents published by a parliamentary committee investigating the anonymous whistleblower’s allegations – several of which have been confirmed to be true – the ex-KPMG employee detailed the strategies allegedly used against them.
“If I were asked, genuinely, whether I would do this again, my answer would be no,” he wrote. “Not because the matters were not worth raising, and not because I regret raising them, but because of what I now know, and could not have known then, about what disclosing them at a firm like KPMG, in the legal and regulatory environment that exists in Australia today, actually involves.”
The whistleblower informed KPMG of the allegations, which included that senior staff had accessed board papers from Lendlease and used them to help win work from Westpac, in 2024 but has said he faced years of obfuscation and retaliation from the consultancy firm.
The whistleblower’s submission was published after a blockbuster day of hearings on Friday in which Lendlease’s chairman criticised a “fundamental breach of trust” by KPMG and former independent director Mike Baird said he had been too trusting of the firm.
But long before that hearing, which was sparked by Labor senator Deborah O’Neill’s decision to reveal the whistleblower’s claims in parliament in March, the whistleblower said they had been forced out of the firm and had their identity revealed to a former partner.
“If I had known the inadequacy of the legal protections, the structural gaps in what ASIC can examine, the ambiguity of the partnership relative to the services company, and the limits of regulatory reach over a partnership of this kind, my answer would have been different,” the whistleblower said.
“If I had known the full range of tools available to KPMG, that it was prepared to use: at least five external law firms across four jurisdictions, the circulation of my identity and the substance of my protected disclosure within and beyond the firm, the retaliation, the end of my employment, and the coordination with member firms across the global network, I would not do it again.”
Several top KPMG staff including its chief executive Andrew Yates resigned after the scandal came to light. The firm has at points argued that the confidentiality breaches were either not significant or could not be substantiated, and framed the whistleblower’s allegations as a workplace grievance. It engaged both Ashurst and Allens at different points to look into the claims or its handling of them.
On Friday, Yates said that the firm did not “get it right” in how it handled the issue but defended its motivations. “I felt at every point in time my team were conducting themselves in the right way,” he said.
KPMG Australia’s chairman Martin Sheppard told the committee that he was sorry for the whistleblower’s experience.
“I am deeply apologetic to the whistleblower, and… it is extraordinarily uncomfortable to sit here knowing the frustration we’ve caused the whistleblower, particularly around the way that the whistleblower protections have been presented to him, and I do apologise for that,” he said.
Existing legal protections for whistleblowers are primarily delivered via the law governing companies, but KPMG is a partnership (which is a different legal structure) that employs staff via company, making it complex to apply the rules.
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