Updated August 10, 2026 — 6:30pm,first published 3:49pm
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KPMG’s chairman-elect Michael Ebeid has issued a grovelling apology for dismissing allegations from a whistleblower that have rocked the consultancy as he fights to win his job on a permanent basis.
And in a bigger issue for the consultancy, documents released by parliament on Monday showed that two major law firms that reviewed the whistleblower’s claims early in the saga failed to take basic steps, such as interviewing people involved or checking staff emails.
But in March, Ebeid had emailed his colleagues on the KPMG board accusing Labor’s Senator Deborah O’Neill of airing “completely false” allegations when she read out the whistleblower’s claims that top staff at the firm had misused confidential client information. Those allegations have since been substantiated.
Ebeid, who has essentially been functioning as the chairman of the firm that is trying to recover from its top executives’ misuse of clients’ confidential audit documents, needs to get the backing of KPMG partners in a vote that concludes on Wednesday.
On Monday, documents released by O’Neill’s parliamentary committee, which is investigating the scandal, revealed Ebeid’s personal apology to O’Neill for the March email.
“What I wrote was wrong,” Ebeid told O’Neill on Saturday, according to one document. “I described statements about the whistleblower’s allegations made by you to the Senate as false. I described the firm’s process as thorough. Events since have shown that neither was true, and that the concerns you raised on the whistleblower’s behalf have helped uncover serious wrongdoing and I can only thank you for that.”
He said he thought he was being helpful, based on his knowledge at the time. “However, with what I know now, my email was naive, embarrassing and wrong on every level,” Ebeid wrote.
And in a fresh issue for the embattled firm, the committee also released documents that KPMG had battled to keep hidden under claims of legal professional privilege. The committee said it was in the public interest to release these documents ahead of another public grilling this Friday.
The legal documents were the reports from two law firms, Allens and Ashurst, and relate to their work on the whistleblower complaints. KPMG had initially used the reports from the law firms to claim that the whistleblower’s complaints were unsubstantiated while refusing to make the actual documents public.
A fresh investigation by Allens has led to a purge of KPMG’s most senior people as some of the most serious allegations have now been substantiated.
“The Ashurst and Allens processes were central to the claim that KPMG had undertaken comprehensive internal and external investigations prior to the speech given by Senator Deborah O’Neill on 24 March 2026,” the committee – chaired by O’Neill – said in a statement.
It said the committee had found there was a “compelling public interest” in examining the results of the law firms’ investigations at its next hearing, allowing it to publish the previously legally privileged documents.
KPMG’s new chief executive John Sams told partners that the parliamentary committee informed the firm of its intentions to publish the documents on Friday.