The consulting firm that pocketed $11 million from the government’s botched vaccine rollout — and kept the details of the contract secret for eight months — has rewarded its partners with an 18% pay rise.
The Morrison government gave PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) a 12-month contract in December to act as a “delivery partner” for the vaccine rollout. But the details of the contract were kept secret for months after the Health Department revealed it was “mistakenly” left off the AusTender website.
On Tuesday PwC announced its partners will take home an 18% increase in profits off the back of a boom in business, thanks in part to the soaring amount of work coming from the government during the COVID-19 recovery. This is despite the firm slashing jobs during the pandemic and receiving more than a dozen sexual harassment and serious misconduct complaints.
The starting income for a PwC partner is about $350k, according to the AFR.
CEO Tom Seymour said despite some parts of the business struggling during 2020, overall the firm had been “busier than it has ever been”.
Big winners
Consultants are some of the biggest winners from the pandemic, reaping more than a billion dollars in federal government contracts. The bulk of that has poured into the coffers of the seven biggest consulting firms — the big four accounting firms plus McKinsey, Boston Consulting and Accenture.
But they have all been criticised for operating under a secrecy blanket as they handle some of the most critical work in the government’s pandemic response with little transparency. Their role in the bungled vaccine rollout has been particularly opaque, despite being paid thousands of dollars a day.
As Crikey has reported, the government outsourced key pillars of its shambolic vaccine rollout to McKinsey, Accenture and PwC. The deal with PwC was undisclosed; Health Department officials claimed it was “incorrectly registered” in its financial management system.
The use of external consultants, which has intensified over the past year, goes well beyond the vaccine rollout. Federal and state governments have spent millions on them, and they’ve been put in charge of everything from the COVIDSafe app to mapping the impact of the pandemic on tourism and education.
But despite increasing its partner income, PwC cut 250 staff throughout the year and slashed the pay and hours of about 65% of staff by 4%. As well, it faces growing pressure to address sexual harassment and misconduct claims, along with the other big accounting firms.
PwC says it had received 13 bullying harassment, sexual harassment and serious misconduct complaints throughout the year but it would not reveal details. This compares with 17 workplace conduct complaints a year at KPMG and 15 a year at Deloitte.
No doubt the KPIs of consulting firms has nothing to do with producing quality analysis. It’s all about the dollars. If you can overcharge for pages of useless waffle printed on the back of fish and chip paper, you get a bonus; if you produce a well-researched opus that leads to the end of world hunger and a permanent middle-east peace, you might still get sacked if there wasn’t enough money in it. Short-termism rules, even if there is brand damage.
“… if you produce a well-researched opus that leads to the end of world hunger and a permanent middle-east peace…” you will definitely be sacked – you are destroying whole fields of consulting endeavor.
It like the ‘health’ industry – the aim is to keep people sick but alive and consuming – rather than healthy and not consuming. This approach could be labeled the capitalist co-dependency model. Note that this does nor apply to every individual in the industry – just to too many corporate KPIs.
Which of course begs the question – do the consultants add any value? Why hire them? And the answer is, senior managers often hide behind consultants when they don’t want to make decisions. So as glib as it sounds, the answer may be to change the culture of organisations so that these managers are armed to make decisions themselves. Perhaps by starting to write this into THEIR KPIs.
Consultant (def’n) A group or persons reputed to have vast experience in time telling, hired to tell you the time, use young inexperienced graduates to generate the reports telling the time, then take your watch with them when they leave.
It’s not what you do, it’s who you know.
I think it’s more a case of “it’s not whether you do…”.
And we will chase those damned Jobseekers for every dollar we can pretend they owe us, said Smirko the clown to his donor buddies.
And this is news? More like business as usual…
Has MSM made this a known? Or is it stuck in the business pages with only profits being mentioned?