The Chaser Report - We're Applying For PWC!

Episode Date: June 4, 2023

Dom and Charles, consultancy extraordinaires and ethical black holes, apply for jobs at the prestigious PWC. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Chaser Report is recorded on Gadigal Land. Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser Report. Hello, and welcome to The Chaser Report with Dom and Charles. Look, Charles, this is going to be awkward. I am. But I'm applying for a full-time position elsewhere. I mean, I can probably still do this now and then, but I just want to do... You don't work full-time on this podcast?

No, no. But look, I've been sent to a recruitment homepage. And it sounds pretty exciting. You might want to sign up as well. Oh, wow. It's possible to do something we do together. It's about, we'd have to go and work in Canberra, but we'd be doing meaningful work that impacts millions of Australians.

Oh, wow. And, I mean, there's all kinds of things we could potentially do. We would be able to go and make an impact in government, defence, health and age care and infrastructure. And it turns out there's a lot of jobs available at this employer. It's a world famous employee. You've probably heard of them. World famous.

Yeah, it's like one of the world's biggest companies, actually, in terms of services firms. It's called PWC. Oh, right. I'm going to say on this after this. Yeah, Charles, I'm looking at the vacancies and the avidavitaph, how do they have any work on? How are not all their contracts cancelled, especially in Canberra?

I'm not kidding. The top job available. I'm actually going to apply for this. Yeah, Chief, Chief Ephesist. No, that's what they need. The first one. one is the top job, governance risk and compliance director. That is the top job in their camera office. Well, they certainly probably should have filled that a few years ago.

Just for people who haven't been following the latest twists in terms of consultancy-based scandals in Canberra, PWC, just to sort of give you some context, well, what did they do? For the last 10 years, they consulted to the Australian government. And one of the consultancies that they did was how to sort of make tax law more taxing. Yeah, more taxi. They wanted to work, the Australian government wanted to figure out how to get more tax from global businesses like Google. And it was a huge announcement by the Treasury to go, we're actually going to call back billions of dollars. It was a really exciting thing to think that these massive companies that earn all this money in Australia and pay no tax,

that we're actually finally going to get them to pay something, not their fair share, but it's something. Yes. And so they got PWC in to provide advice on how to do this and here's the plan, will it work. And the same partner went and advised all of these companies how to avoid campaign tax. Within hours of the law being announced, he was on the phone. Hot tip, guys. And my understanding is they'd slipped something in there which they knew was a loophole, which was sort of their special source that they could sell everyone as the way through.

Like they'd already planned how to evade the thing that they'd been paid by the government to design. Well, this is the thing. I mean, traditionally in consulting firms, and I worked for a big consulting firm at one point, they're very strict about having people who are working for, you know, opponents, competitors, whatever it is, not talking to each other. In fact, some firms will only work for one particular company in a particular industry. But another way to do it, Charles, is for the same person to be playing both sides of the field and playing them off against each other.

That way you make more money. And it's just unethical. It's the slight problem with that. So wait a minute, what jobs do they have? Because when you say unethical, I think, chiching. Well, I mean, governance, risking compliance to eat days. The job closes in a couple of days, actually. It closes...

Oh, that's all right. I'm sure you can just bribe the person who's accepting the things to extend the deadline unethically. Part of the job is to identify gaps in the market. And to support the team To disrupt, it says here Oh, imagine doing that job interview That would be hilarious

We have to apply We've got to apply. We've got to apply. And apparently in this job You would solve meaningful problems Seems something you would create meaningful problems The other jobs You do both

That's true in both sides Yeah So the other jobs PWC's gotten its Canberra office at the mode I'm not making this up Senior Auditor's Centre of Excellence What? Would we be calling it a centre of excellence

At this point? Work health and safety specialist. I can understand why they need one of those. There's also a manager assurance centre of excellence. So really, they're aspiring for excellence. But what is assurance of excellence? That's sort of, that sounds like something the chaser would say in its slogan. Like our slogan is striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence. Actually, we need to be a centre of mediocrity. We need to establish a satire center of mediocrity. We need to get an auditor in to make sure we're mediocre enough. There's some great other jobs here. Manager

procurement ops risk and gov. Yeah, I don't quite know what that means, but I think there are some risks to manage. Well, it's the risk of procuring government contracts that you then sell out the government on. The extraordinary thing is that following this scandal, which is just basically the most egregious possible thing that an advisory firm can do.

Oh, it's stealing. It's stealing from the Australian public. It is essentially fraud. Yes, it is. You're charging for services that you're not providing. And it's treason as well. Arguably, yeah. In fact, I heard I can't completely back this up.

I've been doing a lot of talking about this this week in some other work that I'm doing. And here's the thing. Apparently, in some of these contracts, they've actually put provisions suggesting that it might be a crime if you do the wrong. It would definitely be a crime. Surely it's a, I mean, how can it not be a crime?

To defraud the Australian government. Yes, that is criminal. Like, fraud is a crime. I mean, next you're going to say that trying to build car parks in returns for votes is, dodgy. I mean, Charles, where is the line here? The problem is, though, isn't it? It's a white collar crime. Yeah, it's an inverted commas crime.

Yes. It's crime and you put the font in white so no one can read it. Done by people who sit in boardrooms. So, yeah. The consequences are a slap over the wrist and an executive job at Channel 7. No, well, Charles, what they have here is. This is the company that offered Ben, Robert Smith, the partnership, as we said in that special episode the other day. But, Charles, they've put nine partners on leave as a result of this.

On paid leave. Paid leave. Sort of a holiday, really. But it's fair enough that the same people are now defrauding PWC employees by getting still getting paid. Dom, can I confess my sins of fraud and embezzlement at the chaser in order to get put on paid leave? You probably could. I'm feeling a bit haggard.

I need a bit of arrest. But the amazing thing is they haven't named the nine people. Well, I can tell you the money that I've stolen from the Chaser. Okay. It happened just recently, which is, I don't know whether you remember, but we put out an album. Remember the album that we put out? Oh, we put out the album.

Yeah, yeah, that's right. The best sketches from the Radio Chaser radio program. It's still available. We've still got quite a few of them. Yeah, we've still got lots of physical albums. Strangely, very few people bought physical CDs. You can stream it if you want to check it out. But people do stream it.

Like, a lot of people stream it. Like, we've had hundreds of thousands of streams just in the last year. Seriously. And I checked the, account the other day, like to visit an account that links to Spotify. Oh, okay. And we earned, get this,

$76 in royalties for the year to for the year, basically. Charles Cole makes me come has 65,000 streams on Spotify. That wasn't on the album. That wasn't on the album. That's a

massive amount of amount of like. Do we get paid for that? That would have been worth 20 bucks. No, Cam gets all the royalties for that. But, no, but the album made a $76 US dollars. US dollars? Yeah. Oh, which is basically a hundred bucks.

And, but the fee for maintaining the album on Spotify through this service is $69.25. So I just saw it, should I do the disbursement of $7? There were about sort of five or six people involved in the album. So it would be probably about $1.25 each. And I decided, no, I'm going to embezzle it. You owe us a beer? Yeah. Actually, no, you're not a beer.

It's not a beer. I owe you one beer between six or seven people. It's a symbol of beer. It's great. The Chaser Report, news a few days after it happens. So do you think that it impressed the recruiters at PWC? Oh, it might do. I definitely think we should actually.

apply for these jobs. If you can give us we need some fake referees. Oh, yes. Can you email a podcast at chaser.com. If you have an actual job in this field. Yes.

And we can use you as a referee. That would be enormously useful. Oh, otherwise I'll just put you as my referee. You're a CEO, aren't you? Yeah, yeah. Actually, that's true. An unethical CEO. But there's so many great details.

So there's nine partners. They haven't identified who they are. You know why? They think it would be unethical. And Malcolm Turnbull was on. on radio this week, demanding that they'd be named and shamed these people who did it. Right, okay. He's very upset about the things that happened on his...

On his watch. He seems to be increasingly upset about everything that he had the exact power to change and didn't when he was prime minister. We've got to remember how it worked, Charles. We had Q&A slash RN Malcolm Turnbull for many years in exile. Yes. Then he became the leader and became... Yeah, Peter Duncan.

Compromised liberal leader. Basically, I think Barnaby Joyce, the technical term, has had his balls in a vice. And then as soon as he left politics, he became affable centrist, principled Malcolm again. And look, in fairness to him, wouldn't we all be a bit like that if we, you know, became wrongness, and if we walked away from the, yeah, I mean. Like, you know, like, that is what, like, yeah, that is just human nature that, like, like, not wanting to excuse him, but you just go, actually everyone would be shit in that job. Yeah, I mean, and yeah, yeah, I had to slide on a few of my principles in order for my colleagues,

not to backstab me the way they did before and did eventually. It was so frustrating because you could see them. They were going to backstab him anyway. Why not just, that's the thing. It's like a panda moment. They're behind you. They're behind you. And he's going,

oh, yes, they're all behind me. I think I wrote him a speech. I actually wrote a speech which I published where he came out and endorsed same-sex marriage. And my concept was the only way he wasn't going to get backstabbed by his colleagues is if he was so popular in the polls that they couldn't. Because he was so liked. But instead he pared.

to them and they backstated him. Malcolm, you should have given my speech. It's in the Guardian. I wrote it for you. It's nice. I can't believe I thought he'd read it in the God. Didn't he start the Guardian? Malcolm? I did it for you. But you've got to, so the thing so the thing is, PWC, they've put on leave these nine people. Yes. Gardening leave. The gardening leave. And then, and then now what happens? I mean, surely they won't get any extra. I mean, besides that tax contract, that tax office contract that they got the other day, I don't know when you saw that. Did you see that?

There are dozens of other contracts they've got. The defence they've got, they've got that. Everyone has PwC working for them. The techs department just recently discovered that they had been underpaying their employees. So they got PWC in to audit. To order it or just figure out a more legal way to do it, to underpay their employees. Oh, right. Oh, okay.

Yeah, that is more wide. Because, I mean, this is another example of the sort of awkwardness of all of this, the way these service firms work. They would provide, you could get from PWC, both the strategic advice on how to minimise your tax and then also the auditing to say whether you'd done a decent job and paid your tax. That would be the same company doing both sides of that equation. Right. And it might seem like a conflict of interest. I see it as an alignment of interest in making lots of money out of the taxpayer. Yeah. Yeah, that's fair enough. Why are we not

a professional services firm? I don't know. I mean, you'd say a lack of expertise, but you don't seem to need expertise to bill taxpayers for hundreds of millions of dollars. No, you don't. Yeah, we should just apply to become a supplier to the federal government. Yeah, of satirical services. Yes. We could audit. You know what we should do. And audit in mediocrity.

We should audit any plan. We should get them to run any plan that they've got past us. Yes. To see if anyone's going to make fun of it. Because that's what we would do. A comedy audit. Yes, a comedy audit to work out of something. You know when a couple of years ago, the Australian government, I think, created a new agency

that looked like a dick. The women's network. The women's network. I've got a pair of breasts. Funny anecdote about that logo, right, which you. She's, we mocked it in our interview show that year. I think it was the war on 2021 or something. And because it looked like a dick and bulls.

It looked like both pressed and a dick and balls. And no one said, hey, guys, there's a slight issue with this. And so we were in Canberra. We did a show in Canberra. And we showed that, and it was during the quiz. Mark does this quiz in our shows. And that's one of the things. One of the women who'd got up on stage to do the quiz said,

oh, I designed that logo. I was in the women's network, and I designed the logo. That's brilliant. See, Charles, what we would do is the government would show us what they were going to do, and we'd say whether or not it was going to be made fun of, and then we'd use that privilege information to make fun of it before anyone else could. Oh, yes. We'd play both sides at the table.

And so everyone would have the drop. And we'd have the drop. So the moment some big announcement was happened, we'd have the gags ready to go. Yep, absolutely. You have, and unlike, you know, four to six hours later, like these at the moment. It would mean, Charles, with the advice that we gave them about where the people would make fun was necessarily compromised. Yes. They'd be paying us to give us advice.

We were then going to go and break. But that's what they do. That's that they do. All right. I'm going to apply for this job. Yep. As, what was it? And I might apply for your deputy.

I'm going to be your deputy. Yeah, that'd be great. So I'm going to apply for Director of Governance, risk, and compliance. And I'll be the receptionist. If anyone wants to write me a referral, podcast at chaser.com.com. I'll let you know how it goes. Look, they're probably pretty desperate. I bet you I'll at least get an interview.

Yeah, and actually, if anyone, especially from PWC, is listening and wants to give me a reference, that would be great too. Can you, can you order our tax and provide advice on tax minimization at the same time? Yeah, that's great. That'd be great. Thank you. We don't have any money, but frankly, you need clients more than need money at this point. I've got a sweet $7 while hanging around.

Aguiz from Road, but part of the Iconiclass Network will catch you next time. See you.