Spotlight on the 2023 Gold Walkley winners
An interview with Neil Chenoweth and Edmund Tadros about their investigation into the PwC tax scandal.
The Australian Financial Review’s Neil Chenoweth and Edmund Tadros were four-time winners at the 68th Walkley Awards, including the top gong, the Gold Walkley — recognised as the pinnacle of journalistic achievement in Australia — for their year-long coverage of the PwC tax scandal and its ramifications.
Chenoweth and Tadros’ entry ‘PwC Tax Leaks Scandal’ (stories 1,2,3) won the Business Journalism and Investigative categories, and they were also part of the Australian Financial Review Team that work Coverage Of A Major News Event or Issue (stories 1,2,3,4,5,6).
The pair joined the Walkley Foundation’s Kevin Ding for an interview in which they discuss the impacts of their reporting and reflect on their careers.
This story began with Neil’s first article on January 22 2023 and since then, your reporting has sparked three parliamentary inquiries, an AFP investigation, corporate restructures, and an overall reckoning with misconduct in the Big Four accounting firms. Can you talk us through the impact this story has had?
Neil: That first story that came out in January had a substantial impact. The Treasurer expressed outrage over the findings and a number of other people did too. But PwC is not a novice to damage control and they played it very, very well. They were able to just say, ‘Look, it is our bad, one of our guys did the wrong thing. He’s no longer with the firm — it’s all cool now. And we’ve introduced these world-best reporting and governance requirements to make sure it will never, never happen again.’
PwC had misused confidential information. The Tax Practitioners Board (TPB), the little entity that had made the finding, had ruled that a former partner of the firm had leaked confidential government information. That ex-partner, Peter Collins, was barred from being a tax agent for two years and the firm was asked to do extra training for its staff.
Then, the TPB got called to the Senate estimates hearing in February, and it went pretty quietly up until late at night, when Deborah O’Neill asked how many PwC partners were involved, and Michael O’Neill, the CEO of the TPB said, ‘Well, according to the documents we have, between 20 and 30. We’re not sure of the exact number, but that’s what the documents say’. Suddenly, the story was all up again.
Edmund: [The AFR had] a summit in March, several weeks after the Senate hearing. PwC was a sponsor of the AFR Business Summit, and there was a fireside chat between Tom Seymour, the head of PwC Australia, and our columnist Jennifer Hewett. She asked him towards the end, ‘What about this Senate evidence? What do you think?’ and he could’ve answered any way, but what he chose to do was to answer it very carefully and say it’s all a perception problem, it’s not a big deal… He uses very specific language. I think he technically answers it, but doesn’t quite answer the gist of the question.
Neil: [In early March, Senators] Deborah O’Neill and Barbara Pocock put requests in for copies of the emails that are involved in this case, which show PwC partners discussing how to use their confidential information — the information that Peter Collins and others had received. In the end, [the emails were released in April], and then this laborious process [started] of having emails passed across to the Senate committee, and for us to have a look at them, to be able to write about them for our newspaper the next day.
How did it play out that first week after the emails were published?
Edmund: Our article came out that said ‘This is what the contents of these emails show’. It basically showed that this was a much wider problem within PwC. Dozens of PwC operatives were involved and the information from Collins was used to help multiple multinationals sidestep tax laws the firm was helping the government develop. So the firm and its clients were effectively financially benefiting from the stolen information.. [When the piece came out on Wednesday,] the firm said that everybody involved had already left the firm. By Friday, Tom Seymour was saying ‘Actually, I’m on the emails’, which had a whole host of implications, because the CEO is suddenly saying, a few months after Neil’s January story, that not only did he know about the emails, he’s on them.
In terms of our coverage, the first Saturday story we do, Neil had the lead on that and it was talking about the history of this, going back to the 2015 Senate hearing where Tom Seymour sat next to Peter Collins and said how they would never advise their clients to do anything untoward.
Edmund, in your experience covering the financial services sector, have you seen anything else like this?
Edmund: No. They had a couple of problems. One was, only a small group of very senior leaders within PwC knew the extent of it from the beginning. That group didn’t even share it with key people that I would deal with just to give them a heads up. After that Friday meeting happened where Tom admitted he was on the emails, there was such rage within PwC… they felt quite let down by their leaders basically. And then it all unfolded from there.
Neil: At the same time, in the broader community, there was this outrage…
Finance stories can be awfully complicated, but this came down to a pretty simple proposition that we were betrayed. A group of people who were asked to put their interests aside and do something for the country, to do something for the Treasury, for the Government… they actually used information to make money for themselves. There’s just a sense of real outrage and betrayal that comes from that. I think that’s what fuelled how this story grew so much.
What changes do you expect will happen in the next year or so?
Neil: It’s the nature of big stories like this — it feels a little like, you’re in the kitchen at night and you turn on the light and see things you maybe wish you hadn’t seen. There’s all sorts of things going on that get uncovered. In the end, the light is turned off again. This is the point we’re at right now. There’s a whole bunch of stuff that we’ve looked at that’s come to light through the Senate and everywhere else. We would suggest that there are more fundamental problems elsewhere — how the Tax Office works and its relationships with PwC, the way consultants are now running the public service — which we’d like to explore. That’s the challenge before us now.
Neil, it sounds like you may be pessimistic about genuine changes occurring in the future.
Neil: Look, I guess I’m a mixture of optimism and realism, I’m hoping. I think there is substantial change that can be done, that has been achieved. But, we’re in an imperfect world and it’s an ongoing process.
Were there any roadblocks in pursuing this story?
Edmund: We did that May story, and then we just did the next story that came along. I don’t know… the main roadblock we have now is time. This has spawned so many offshoot things that it’s actually impossible to keep up with.
Now this story has led to you and Neil winning the Gold Walkley. So what’s next? Should we expect another agenda-setting story — one of those offshoots you mention perhaps?
Edmund: This has been… I mean, the May story was quite a big story, but I never imagined that this would happen in the sequence it did. I don’t know if you can actually set out to write a Walkley-winning story. But I haven’t won this before, Neil would know more than me. He’s played this game several times.
Neil: I think the first requirement of good journalism is to have really lucky timing. Chance and luck has a lot to do with it, you know.
Going back to the very beginning, what made you want to be a journalist?
Neil: I finished high school. My mother found an ad for a cadet journalist, which I thought was throwing papers over the fence, so I could do my degree while I was doing that. It turned out to be not quite that way. I worked for this little afternoon paper in Brisbane. They threw me into the finance department, and I thought I was just gonna die. Finance was just so boring. I mean, incredibly boring. You know, I’m sitting there, and all my friends have reached university and are having a grand old time. But after a year or so, you read enough of it to understand what’s being said and realise this is actually about power structures and power plays and understanding them becomes really fascinating.
Edmund: When I first started in journalism at The Sydney Morning Herald, I realised I’ve met my people. But they weren’t quite my branch of my people. But then I got to The Fin, more than ten years ago, and realised I’d met my branch of my people. The slightly nerdier branch of the journalism world, for want of a better term.
Journalists are professionals, and there’s not really that much that separates the different types of professionals I write about. They’re usually experts in a niche topic, but they also go home every night and look after their kids and so on. All I see myself doing is thinking about what would they want to read about? I get to talk to quite interesting people and it’s quite fun.
This story was all about power and corruption, and that’s why so many people were engaged with it right?
Neil: I think the other issue [with stories like this is] you always have to sweat the small stuff, you always have to be concerned with… Are you being fair to these guys? You can’t treat that just as a rhetorical flourish, a moral gesture, you really have to be focussed all the time. There is a moral imperative that we have to have as journalists, always to be constantly questioning our own motives, our own technique, and the fairness of the things that we do.
What’s your message to Australians about the importance of quality journalism, especially in this increasingly divided age?
Neil: What we do at the Financial Review is an expensive process. The resources we have are considerable. The risk is that these sorts of empowered voices will be stilled by economic processes and laws that encroach upon media freedoms that we have. It’s critical that there are voices that are informed and that the public at large can trust. I also think it’s absolutely critical that we as journalists live up to that trust and perform in a way that makes people trust us. That’s our great dilemma right now.
Edmund: Look, I think you just want to tell people as close to what’s going on as possible. My experience in the professional services round is that there’s a certain type of corporate culture, that is, you have to be optimistic to be a business person. You have to think things are going to turn out well, even when they’re not going that well. Journalists just want to know what’s going on, and that’s where a lot of the tension is. That’s where we can be helpful, and that’s where people talk. When there’s a gap between what they’re experiencing and seeing, and what they’re being told — that makes most people uncomfortable.
Let’s end on a light note. Which one of you will be keeping the Gold trophy?
Neil: We were either going to share time on it, or buy a second one.
Edmund: I mainly need it for my mum to take a photo with it.
Watch the 2023 Gold Walkley winners’ speech:
Neil Chenoweth is an investigative reporter for The Australian Financial Review.
Edmund Tadros is the professional services editor at The Australian Financial Review.
Kevin Ding is one of the 2023 Jacoby-Walkley Scholarship winners.
