The Most Expensive Advice In the World
The Editors
In December 2013, a PricewaterhouseCoopers partner named Peter Collins joined a confidential government panel in Australia to help design new anti-avoidance tax laws targeting multinational corporations. The panel was not a paid engagement but was positioned as an act of public-spiritedness, a firm lending its expertise to the state for the common good, and Collins attended the meetings and read the draft legislation. Then, between September 2014 and May 2015, as the law took shape, he sent a series of internal emails to at least 143 named PwC partners explaining how the firm's corporate clients could be helped to circumvent the very provisions he was helping write. Within weeks of the law's public announcement, PwC had approached twenty-three US technology companies with restructuring advice designed to neutralise it.
This arrangement, which PwC initially described as the work of a single rogue partner and later admitted involved its leadership and governance at the highest levels, came to public attention only in 2022, seven years after the emails were sent and six years after the Australian Tax Office had identified Collins as the probable source of a leak it had been quietly investigating without acting on. In the intervening years the firm had continued to win government contracts at an accelerating rate, with federal and state government spending on PwC in Australia increasing by 1,270% between 2013 and 2023, and the federal government paying the firm over $500 million per year by the time the scandal broke. When it did break, PwC sold its government consulting arm, which had been valued at over $100 million, to a private equity firm for AU$ 1, and the firm's CEO resigned alongside eight partners whose culpability the subsequent internal investigation acknowledged before immediately noting that the review had been conducted by PwC itself.
The structure Collins was exploiting is not an anomaly in the consulting industry but something considerably closer to its organising principle. The major global consulting and accounting firms, a group dominated by McKinsey, the Big Four accountancies, Bain, Boston Consulting Group and a small number of others have built their position as indispensable advisers to governments precisely because they simultaneously advise the corporations those governments are trying to regulate, tax, and compete with. The information asymmetry this creates, a firm that knows both what the state is planning and what its private clients need, is the most commercially valuable asset the industry possesses, and the Australian case is distinguishable from the norm primarily in that the emails survived and became public rather than in what the emails actually describe.
In France, the same dynamic took creative liberty and while Emmanuel Macron had been a partner at an investment bank with no significant history in party politics ahead of the 2017 presidential election, when around twenty McKinsey employees helped write his policy programme. At least two former McKinsey staff subsequently gained influential positions in his government. A 2022 French Senate investigation found that the Macron government had awarded McKinsey €2.4 billion in consultancy fees since 2018, including over €1 billion in 2021 alone, and that despite a French turnover of €329 million the firm had not paid a centime of corporation tax in France in 2020, a situation that became particularly difficult to explain when it emerged that the firm's advice on Covid-19 vaccination policy had been delivered to a government paying it tens of millions of euros while McKinsey simultaneously advised on procurement from vaccine manufacturers whose own senior leadership included McKinsey alumni. Anti-corruption prosecutors opened a criminal investigation into whether the government contracts had been awarded in exchange for the firm's earlier assistance with the 2017 and 2022 election campaigns. Macron denied wrongdoing, and his government promised to reduce spending on consultants by 15%, without specifying how this would be monitored or enforced.
The South African case is the most extensively documented and, by some distance, the most consequential. Under Jacob Zuma's presidency from 2009 to 2018, a network of relationships between the Zuma family, the Gupta business family, senior officials at state-owned enterprises and international consulting firms produced what the Zondo Commission documented in its thousands of pages as systematic state capture, the wholesale redirection of public institutions toward private enrichment. McKinsey was retained to advise Transnet, the state-owned logistics company, on the purchase of 1,064 locomotives at a total cost of 54 billion rand, and in the process partnered with Trillian Capital Partners, a company connected to the Gupta network, receiving fees that the US Justice Department later described as proceeds of a bribery scheme. A former McKinsey senior partner, Vikas Sagar, pleaded guilty to conspiring to violate US foreign bribery laws. McKinsey paid $122 million to resolve the resulting criminal allegations in December 2024, having already repaid $63 million in fees to Transnet in 2021, and researchers at the University of Sussex drawing on Zondo Commission evidence described the firm's broader role as having lent its global reputation to shield politically connected local partners from scrutiny while helping to channel billions through Gupta-linked networks. It had simultaneously advised on the reduction of internal capacity at both Eskom and Transnet in ways that left both companies more vulnerable to future capture. Bain was separately found by the Commission to have acted unlawfully in manipulating South African Revenue Service procedures in ways that benefited private clients. KPMG had audited the Gupta family's investment vehicles while producing a report on SARS that was later shown to have been compromised, and SAP paid back fees over improper contracts at the same state-owned enterprises, producing what the Commission's documentation treats as an industry-wide pattern rather than a series of unrelated failures.
In India, PwC's relationship with corporate governance took a different route through the 2009 Satyam scandal, in which the chairman of Satyam Computer Services, Ramalinga Raju, confessed to a $1.7 billion accounting fraud that PwC's auditors had failed to detect across multiple years of engagement, leading India's securities regulator to ban PwC from auditing listed Indian companies for two years, a decision the firm appealed while the question of how an auditor of PwC's standing had missed or declined to confront systematic falsification of accounts at a major listed corporation remained largely unanswered in the firm's public communications.
The opioid case in the United States is the one in which the industry's access-not-expertise business model is most visibly documented. McKinsey simultaneously advised Purdue Pharma on sales strategies for OxyContin and advised the US Food and Drug Administration on drug safety policy, with at least twenty-two consultants, including senior partners, working on both sides of this arrangement across a period of roughly a decade. The firm failed to disclose any of these conflicts to the FDA despite federal contracting requirements that it do so. A 2022 US House Committee investigation identified thirty-seven FDA contracts staffed by consultants who simultaneously or previously worked for Purdue, with some of the projects in direct tension, a 2009 engagement in which McKinsey recommended Purdue defend against strict FDA treatment of its opioids, followed in 2011 by the same consultant being staffed inside the FDA office responsible for overseeing elements of the same safety programme. In 2025 McKinsey agreed to pay $650 million to resolve the criminal and civil investigations that followed, the first time a management consulting firm had been held criminally responsible for advice resulting in the commission of a crime by a client, with the Justice Department specifying that the firm had advised Purdue on steps to "turbocharge" sales of OxyContin in 2013, during a period when overdose deaths from the drug were mounting into the tens of thousands annually. When McKinsey had told Purdue's CEO in 2014 that it brought an "unequalled capability based on who we know and what we know," specifically mentioning the FDA as an organisation it had supported for over five years, it was describing its access to both sides of a regulatory relationship in which the interests of those two sides were opposed, and from which it was extracting fees from each without informing either of the other's existence.
What makes these cases structurally similar, despite their obvious differences in geography, scale and mechanism, is that in each of them the consulting firm's commercial value rested not on superior technical knowledge of a particular domain but on the ability to move between the state and the private sector, carrying information in both directions across boundaries that were supposed to exist, and doing so in ways that the governments involved either could not or did not effectively monitor or prevent. This is what makes the industry structurally incompatible with the interests of domestic consulting firms in developing countries, because what governments in those countries most need when commissioning advisory work, and what they consistently fail to purchase through the tender processes that global firms win, is not access to a network of relationships between capital cities and multilateral institutions but the on-the-ground knowledge of local regulatory environments, procurement histories, political dynamics and implementation realities that takes years to accumulate in a specific place and cannot be replicated by a team of consultants who have read the briefing documents on the flight over.
