Documents tabled by three federal agencies raise questions about whether the ATO tried to shut down the investigation into the PwC tax leaks and targeted the man leading it, Michael O’Neill.
Peter Collins is the PwC partner at the heart of the tax leaks scandal that rocked Australia’s professional services industry last year, and that comment was made by a senior Tax Office executive.
In order to investigate PwC’s actions in using confidential information to pitch to clients, the Board needed to look at case notes and records of how multinationals interacted with PwC over the 2016 Multinational Anti Avoidance Law, using confidential Treasury information. The Tax Office was unwilling to release these documents, saying they were locked up by settlement agreements.
While this went on, on July 5 an unnamed tax officer in Wood’s division made a formal complaint, on behalf of several people, of bullying and harassment by O’Neill and other senior Tax Practitioners Board personnel. “I agree … the information provided in the complaint is purely from the perspective of ATO staff members,” replied deputy commissioner Brad Chapman, the head of the agency’s human relations arm, ATO People.
The fight with the Tax Office was about to go ballistic, as tax advisers complained to the Tax Office about the Tax Practitioners Board disclosure notices sent to multinationals.The Tax Practitioners Board met on September 1, beginning with an in-camera session without the chief executive to discuss governance measures, including ones targeting O’Neill.
What Treasury had in mind came from Sukkar’s office: a plan to give the Tax Practitioners Board chairman power to hire and fire the chief executive. Keith James had recommended this measure in his 2019 review of the TPB, as part of a raft of measures to enhance independence. Klug subsequently told board members he had asked advice from Shannon Schuster of ATO People, who spoke of the absence of due process, and told him no bullying issues had been raised by ATO staff using formal channels and that such tensions were “common in the contest of ideas between teams”.
On January 13, 2022, Narain forwarded the Tax Office response to the plan by 11 Tax Office staff. On January 14 ATO general counsel Nicholas Shivas cautioned: “Please note that there is a limited group who are aware of this line of enquiry. The CEO and TPB are not aware, except the Chair who I think may be aware.”
Jeremy Moore, acting deputy commissioner, ATO People, pushed back: “Announcing this before even doing rudimentary consultation with the incumbent could be industrially fraught, appears to lack real leadership and would potentially make the incumbent position untenable while this is being put into place.”
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