ASIC reveals 551 audit misconduct complaints, then faces questions about its own response

Impossibile aggiungere al carrello

Puoi avere soltanto 50 titoli nel carrello per il checkout.

Riprova più tardi

Rimozione dalla Lista desideri non riuscita.

Riprova più tardi

Non è stato possibile aggiungere il titolo alla Libreria

Per favore riprova

Non è stato possibile seguire il Podcast

Per favore riprova

Esecuzione del comando Non seguire più non riuscita

ASIC reveals 551 audit misconduct complaints, then faces questions about its own response

Ascolta gratuitamente

Vedi i dettagli del titolo

Australia’s corporate regulator told a federal parliamentary inquiry on Friday that the big four accounting firms have logged 551 complaints of alleged audit misconduct since mid-2023. But for the first time in this long-running inquiry, it wasn’t the accounting firms facing the toughest questions. It was the regulator itself.What ASIC told the committeeASIC’s executive director of enforcement and compliance, Chris Savundra, told the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Corporations and Financial Services in Sydney that KPMG, PwC, EY and Deloitte have together received 551 whistleblower complaints alleging audit misconduct since 1 July 2023.ASIC chair Sarah Court clarified the scope: the complaints relate to whether registered auditors misused or shared confidential client information, and ASIC used its compulsory information-gathering powers to obtain the underlying material.Court was careful not to overstate the figure. “I don’t want to suggest that there’s, you know, 550 serious whistleblower issues,” she told the hearing, adding that ASIC still has significant work ahead assessing which complaints warrant further investigation or enforcement action.When Greens Senator Barbara Pocock asked whether the 551 complaints were spread roughly evenly across the four firms, in the order of 125 to 130 each, Court asked that the hearing move off-camera before answering. As a result, the per-firm breakdown was not made public at Friday’s session.A tabled report calls KPMG’s disclosures “deceptive”The sharpest material to emerge from Friday’s hearing was a report by law firm Allens, tabled at the inquiry, examining how KPMG handled the whistleblower complaint that triggered the broader audit-leaks scandal: the alleged misuse of confidential Lendlease board papers to support KPMG’s audit-tender bids for Westpac and Dexus.Allens found that KPMG’s 2024 and 2025 Transparency Reports omitted any mention of an active whistleblower complaint, “despite indisputable evidence one existed.” The firm’s conclusion was blunt: those reports were “not transparent at all but misleading — at best deceptive, at worst fraudulent.”KPMG had classified the original 2024 complaint as an HR matter rather than an audit-quality or transparency issue, which is how it came to be left out of documents that regulators, investors and the public rely on.A KPMG spokesperson told the ABC the firm is “progressing work to address integrity issues, strengthen accountability and rebuild trust” under an action plan launched in June, while acknowledging “there is more to do.” KPMG has already cut almost 400 jobs this year following the scandal, after clients including Macquarie ended their engagements with the firm.Appreciate the newsletter but aren’t ready to pay for a subscription? Grab us a beer or snag the exclusive ad spot at the top of next week's newsletter.The regulator under scrutinySenator Pocock used Friday’s hearing to challenge KPMG leadership’s repeated assurances of reform. She noted the committee had “spent hours listening to the leadership of KPMG… telling us that they’ve turned over a new leaf, that they are a new leadership, ‘there is new culture, trust us,’ and yet here we are.”Her expectation, she said, is that new leadership “requires delivery of outcomes,” and that KPMG will be called back before the committee if it doesn’t deliver.But the sharpest challenge to ASIC itself came from a separate whistleblower, whose June 2026 email to the regulator was also tabled at the inquiry. The email, following an earlier disclosure attempt in December 2021, accused ASIC of a “condescending tone” and argued the regulator “will need to be dragged kicking and screaming to take action that has been clearly available against at least one of the big four.”The whistleblower went further, alleging ASIC had “substantially done nothing bar tacitly endorse and further encourage misconduct,” despite auditor misconduct being listed among ASIC’s own stated regulatory priorities for both 2025 and 2026.ASIC rejected that characterisation in a statement to the ABC: “ASIC takes all whistleblower reports and allegations of misconduct seriously… assesses and progresses matters in a timely and methodical manner.” The regulator said a number of investigations and enforcement actions are already underway.Two further details complicate any simple read of the relationship between ASIC and the firms it regulates. Senator Pocock said ASIC signed new contracts with KPMG in March 2026, the same period the scandal became public. And the current chair of the Tax Practitioners Board, Peter de Cure, spent 25 years as a KPMG partner before taking the role.Neither fact establishes wrongdoing on its own, but both feed the underlying question this inquiry keeps circling back to: whether Australia’s audit regulators are positioned closely enough to the firms they oversee to regulate them ...

Ancora nessuna recensione