Daniel Ziffer

speaker

2,266 appearances 25 recordings 3 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 9 Sep

Daniel Ziffer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 25 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 14.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

7am · Big money, client secrets, and a silenced whistleblower: Inside the KPMG scandal · 29 Jun 2026 podcast

They also left open a laptop in a room and joked to another team that, hey, there's some information there you can use.

That's probably the least bad of the three things we're talking about.

The one that probably crystallises it is this.

The team that did the audit for telecommunications company Optus, information from that audit was taken to try and win the vastly more lucrative contract for Optus' rival Telstra.

So they're taking information that they are only privy to because they are auditors, because they have this trusted position where they need to know, where they need to be able to get in and interrogate the numbers, and they're using that in an underhanded way to try and win more business.

Well, the whistleblower left under sufferance, under threat of not having a reference.

From the top of the tree, we've seen the CEO, Andrew Yates.

Mike Baird and the other independent directors who were in front of Parliament basically said that they had quit in part due to the treatment of this whistleblower and due to the way that KPMG had dealt with it to senior...

Audit partners have left, I think a few other smaller people.

And then finally, after Friday's quite explosive hearings, the chair, Martin Shepard, kind of read the room and decided that he would exit in a timely period, probably prompted by the fact that several members of the committee stood up at the end of the day and said he had to go.

We finally got to hear their words, not in person, but read out by a former KPMG executive in this hearing on Friday.

They talked about the toll it had taken, basically said they wouldn't do it again.

The lack of speak-up culture, the culture of fear, retribution and revenue growth at all costs is not acceptable.

The irony, of course, is that one of the many things that KPMG does is run a white label whistleblower service, which means that for institutions, including the Reserve Bank, or retendering that one, they run their whistleblower service.

They can't even run their own whistleblowers, but they are paid handsome sums by government and business to run whistleblower services for others.

It's important to know that a huge number of people who work at KPMG, really smart people, 99 point something percent of them would have absolutely nothing to do with this scandal.

You know, so yes, it's clearly down to questions about conflict, questions about culture.

These are questions that other consulting firms have had to answer in the past.

KPMG itself has the dubious honour of one of the most ironic scandals of all time, where they were caught out for widespread cheating in a compulsory online examination about ethics.

You know, you kind of can't make this stuff up.

Showing 1361–1380 of 2,266 · page 69 of 114