The Tax Practitioners Board has told a parliamentary committee hearing that it rejected an offer from defrocked tax expert Peter Collins to surrender his tax agent registration in the middle of the investigation of the PwC tax leak controversy.
TPB chairman Peter de Cure said practitioners can surrender their registration but Collins – who had his registration terminated – attempted to hand back his registration before the disciplinary action and was rebuffed.
Collins’ termination related to his use of confidential information within PwC’s tax practice in a project designed to sell solutions to multinational companies wishing to dodge new tax laws.
A refusal to accept Collins’ attempt to surrender his registration – a common tactic for people facing disciplinary action – meant the former tax agent could not dodge having a disciplinary finding on his TPB record.
Representatives from the TPB fronted a parliamentary committee – this time a references committee inquiring into the management and assurance of integrity by consulting services – for the second time in a fortnight with the detail of its investigation into PwC.
The TPB alerted senate estimates last week that a broader investigation into PwC was taking place but this week the focus shifted to why Collins was the only person investigated in the first instance.
De Cure said in response to a question from senator Barbara Pocock that the Collins referral dealt only with the now-defrocked international tax expert.
“The referral that came to us was specifically in relation to Peter John Collins,” de Cure said. “It was quite a specific referral in relation to breaches of confidentiality agreements that were signed between him and Treasury.
“We took what we believed to be the appropriate action at that time. Also bear in mind [that] the broader an investigation goes, the less timely it will be. So we pursued the case that was in front of us.”
De Cure said the board then expanded the investigation to include PwC but that the board was always mindful of the six-month statutory timeline for a formal investigation.
“In this instance, we were able to extend the investigation because of the issues we were having around getting the complete full set of evidence and documentation that we felt was required to make a good decision,” de Cure said.
The TPB and the Australian Taxation Office met in September 2021 and held robust discussions about whether the tax agent regulator was requesting documents that were outside its remit as a tax agent regulator.
Pocock asked de Cure about the ATO’s concerns raised at that meeting in 2021 following an article published in the Australian Financial Review that reported concerns about a possible turf dispute between the two authorities.
“The ATO representatives definitely expressed in clear and unmistakeable terms their view in relation to, I guess, how we were investigating the matter,” de Cure said.
“It wasn’t a shouting match in any way shape or form. To suggest there was a shouting match or any sort of vigorous style of debate is not what happened.”
De Cure said any reservations the ATO had about the requests the TPB was making in the Collins investigation vanished when the tax office’s own legal advice said the TPB behaved in accordance with the powers it had to investigate.
The TPB’s appearance before the committee coincides with news of a decision by committee members to not publish names material supplied to the committee by PwC. This includes those named in 144 pages of internal emails tabled in the senate last month.
PwC announced to partners earlier this week in an internal email that it had supplied to the senate the names of 63 individuals mentioned in the email chain and the nine partners on gardening leave pending the firm’s own investigations into the matter. It specifically names four former partners the firm said were involved in the tax leak matter – Michael Bersten, Peter Collins, Neil Fuller and Paul McNab.
McNab took to social media to say he was not involved in consultations with Treasury where confidential information was discussed. He said he “trusted that the information shared with me as a partner of the firm would comply with any confidentiality agreements that may have been in place with Treasury”.
Pocock argued the committee should release the names given the public interest in the matter, but she was outvoted by other committee members.
“Anyone doing business with PwC needs to be fully aware of who was involved and the roles that they played in devising and marketing the multinational tax avoidance scheme,” Pocock said.
“I have repeatedly asked PwC to make public not just the names but the roles that each individual had in perpetrating this serious breach of trust against the Australian people.
“Instead of properly supporting their staff and clarifying the names and actions of those with real involvement, PwC has continued to frustrate and conceal throughout this episode.”
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