Tansy Harcourt

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Ambulance emergency.

I've got a woman unconscious.

And I'm Tansy Harcourt, senior reporter with The Australian.

If you wind it back to when this first became public, Senator Deb O'Neill aired under parliamentary privilege a bunch of claims by a whistleblower.

And among those claims were allegations that senior audit partners had misused confidential documents belonging to specific clients.

The client that they named in relation to that was Lendlease and then used those documents to help win the work

of other clients.

And some of the other names that the whistleblower mentioned was Macquarie Group, Dexus, Westpac.

That was it for the ones that were named at that point in time.

Now, up until that point, the whistleblower only went to Deb O'Neill two years after they first blew the whistle internally at KPMG.

back in 2024.

And at that point in time, an investigation of sorts in inverted commas took place and the whistleblower was effectively shown the door.

The firm decided there was nothing to see here.

Well, exactly.

And look, it can be a little bit different if you look at the big four firms.

So that's KPMG, PWC, EY and Deloitte.

They have units that span from audit, tax and consulting.

And the consultants have always been a little bit more flexible with what they do.