Charles Cohen is the founder of SilverTree Intelligence Group, a Certified Fraud Examiner and experienced corporate investigator whose career has included senior intelligence roles at Aon and Deloitte. Full bio at the end of the article.
Key Takeaways
Partnership structures can intensify whistleblowing failures because ownership, management and commercial interests are unusually concentrated.
The first classification of a complaint matters enormously: treating an integrity issue as an employment grievance can shape everything that follows.
An external investigation is not necessarily an independent one — scope, evidence access and who controls the process matter more than the investigator’s name.
Whistleblower systems should be judged by what happens after someone speaks up, not by whether a hotline or policy exists.
The central governance safeguard: no group with a material stake in the outcome should control how allegations are classified, investigated and explained.
I investigate corporate misconduct for a living, which often means arriving after decisive events and reconstructing what happened from the remaining records. By that point, the people involved have had months or years to develop explanations for their decisions. Documentation is rarely complete, but it can provide a more reliable basis for understanding how an institution responded in real time.
That is what makes the KPMG Australia whistleblower matter useful beyond the immediate scandal. Big4News has already documented the discrepancies between what KPMG told its whistleblower, independent directors, clients and Parliament, and what later emerged in the public record. The broader question is whether those failures reflect something distinctive about professional partnerships or a more general tendency among large organizations to manage threatening information in ways that protect the institution before they protect the reporting process.
My view is that the partnership model is better understood as an intensifier than as the underlying cause. The mechanisms visible in the KPMG record—for example, how a complaint is classified, who controls the investigation, how the reporting employee is treated, and how senior leadership receives information—also appear in organizations with very different ownership structures.
The Importance of the First Classification Decision
Three aspects of the KPMG record are particularly important.
First, the whistleblower’s disclosure was treated substantially as an employment and grievance matter even though the allegations concerned audit integrity, confidential client information and the conduct of senior personnel. That routing decision matters because it determines the framework through which an organization evaluates what follows. An integrity matter directs attention toward evidence, conflicts, independence and accountability. An employment matter naturally brings questions of communication, workplace relationships, performance and process into the foreground.
Second, the external legal reviews did not necessarily constitute the independent examination that outsiders might have assumed. Ashurst later told Parliament that it had not been engaged to investigate the substance of the allegations of misconduct. The subsequent Allens review, Project Magenta, operated within a scope approved by a KPMG board subcommittee, interviewed fourteen senior partners and directors, did not interview the whistleblower, and did not comprehensively search the relevant digital records. Yet it still identified conduct consistent with significant parts of the account it was said to have rejected.
Third, KPMG searched the whistleblower’s computer and located material that set out the substance of his allegations, while continuing to emphasize that it lacked sufficient information to pursue them. None of these facts, considered individually, establishes a coordinated effort to silence a whistleblower. Taken together, however, they show how early decisions about classification, scope, and evidence can shape the institutional response long before anyone reaches a formal conclusion.
Boeing: Operational Pressure without a Partnership Structure
Boeing provides a useful comparison because the organizational form is entirely different. At an April 2024 US Senate hearing, quality engineer Sam Salehpour testified that he had raised concerns about manufacturing and assembly practices involving the 787 and 777 over several years and experienced isolation and transfer after refusing to remain quiet. Former Boeing manager Ed Pierson also described warnings about factory conditions that he believed had been disregarded. Boeing has disputed important technical allegations and has stated that retaliation against employees who raise safety concerns is prohibited.
The organizational point does not depend on resolving engineering disputes. Where delivery schedules, production targets, and financial expectations exert strong pressure, an employee who repeatedly interrupts work to raise concerns can gradually be treated as an operational problem. A person who believes he is protecting quality may be viewed as obstructive, overly cautious, or insufficiently focused on execution. That shift can occur through ordinary performance expectations, meeting dynamics, and reassignment decisions, which is why it can be difficult to distinguish from routine management unless the sequence of events is examined closely.
Wells Fargo: When the Personnel Record Becomes Part of the Defense
Wells Fargo offers a more formal example because there is a government agency finding. In 2022, the US Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration found that Wells Fargo had violated the whistleblower protection provisions of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act by terminating a senior manager in its Chicago-area commercial banking division.
The manager had repeatedly raised concerns through management and the corporate ethics process about conduct he believed violated federal law. OSHA ordered more than $22 million in back wages, benefits, compensatory damages, and other relief. The determination was subject to objection and further proceedings and should not be treated as a final judicial ruling.
The point for boards is how an employment record can become part of the institution’s later explanation. Wells Fargo eventually attributed the termination to restructuring; OSHA found that explanation inconsistent with the treatment of other managers involved in the same initiative. Performance management and restructuring are legitimate functions, but they also create documentation that can later appear neutral and self-explanatory. Investigators therefore need to ask not only what a personnel file says, but how and when that record developed after an employee raised concerns.
Theranos: Legal and Personal Pressure on the Whistleblower
Theranos represents a more overt version of the same imbalance. Employees Tyler Shultz and Erika Cheung raised concerns about the reliability of the company’s blood-testing technology. The company responded to dissent and disclosure with aggressive legal pressure, confidentiality claims, and threats of litigation.
Shultz has described legal expenses running into hundreds of thousands of dollars, as well as severe damage to his relationship with his grandfather, former US Secretary of State George Shultz, who served on the Theranos board.
The case demonstrates the disparity in resources that can arise when an employee challenges an institution with substantial financial, legal, and reputational power. Formal reporting channels and a prominent board provide limited protection if directors receive incomplete information or defer excessively to management. KPMG’s independent directors confronted a different version of that problem: the public record indicates they did not always receive an accurate account of how the whistleblower allegations were handled. That should temper the idea that conventional corporate-governance structures are, by themselves, an adequate solution.
What the Partnership Model Adds
The partnership model still warrants close scrutiny because it concentrates conflicts that may be more dispersed elsewhere.
The first is economic. In a large professional-services partnership, people responsible for overseeing an allegation may share directly in the same profit pool as the partners, clients or practices affected by it. No one has to act dishonestly for that connection to influence judgment. Commercial dependence can shape which issues receive urgency; how much disruption is considered acceptable and how readily senior colleagues are challenged.
The second is the concentration of roles. Senior partners are owners as well as employees, and many also serve as managers, governance participants and major revenue generators. When an allegation concerns a commercially powerful partner, the institution may therefore be investigating a person who is simultaneously a colleague, an owner and an important economic asset.
The third issue is the global network structure. When the KPMG whistleblower escalated his concerns to KPMG International, the global organization declined to investigate, citing the legal separation of the Australian member firm, despite a published hotline framework that contemplated escalation when allegations involved senior leadership at the member firm.
The legal independence of member firms is genuine, but it creates a governance tension: global networks derive substantial commercial value from a shared name while responsibility for misconduct may remain largely within the individual member firm. The Australian Senate identified related governance concerns in its examination of PwC’s tax confidentiality scandal, which it described as a calculated breach of trust.
What I Test When I Review a Whistleblower Matter
Almost every major organization has a whistleblowing policy. The existence of the policy tells me relatively little about whether the system works. I am more interested in four practical questions:
who made the initial classification decision;
what the investigator was actually instructed to examine;
what happened to the complainant after the report;
and whether the evidence was independently searched.
The first two questions concern governance and scope. Who decided that an allegation belonged with HR, compliance, legal, internal audit, or the board, and was that decision recorded? An administrative choice in the first few days can shape the entire response.
Likewise, the name of an outside law firm is less important than its engagement letter. Investigators need to know what questions the firm was authorized to answer, which witnesses it could interview, which systems it could search, and who retained control over those decisions. An investigation can be external without being meaningfully independent.
The next questions concern retaliation and evidence. I want to know what happened to the reporting employee six, twelve, and twenty-four months later. Changes in performance ratings, responsibilities, promotion prospects, access to meetings, or management documentation are measurable and should be reviewed systematically. I also want to know whether the evidence was tested independently rather than relying primarily on interviews with the people implicated by the complaint. Digital records, messages, access logs and financial information can test competing accounts in ways that interviews alone cannot.
The Governance Lesson
Serious institutional misconduct rarely requires a formal conspiracy. More often, the conditions develop through ordinary forces: hierarchy, loyalty, commercial pressure, professional dependence and repeated decisions to give the institution the benefit of the doubt. Employees observe what happens to colleagues who raise difficult issues, and those observations influence whether the next concern is reported, softened or withheld.
For that reason, the quality of a whistleblowing system cannot be measured by the existence of a hotline, an ethics policy or an external law firm on call. More meaningful measures are what happens after a report is made, who controls the next steps, whether evidence is tested independently and whether the person who raised the concern can continue to work without adverse treatment unrelated to legitimate performance issues.
KPMG Australia is especially instructive because so much of that process has entered the public record. Partnerships are not uniquely prone to mishandling unwelcome information, but their concentration of ownership, management, commercial incentives and professional relationships can make institutional self-protection harder to detect and overcome. The governance challenge is therefore not simply to create more reporting channels. It is to ensure that once a concern enters the system, no single group with a material stake in the outcome controls how the concern is classified, investigated and ultimately explained.
This article is part of the Big4News Investigations & Analysis series, which examines the structural forces shaping Deloitte, PwC, EY and KPMG.
About Charles Cohen
Charles Cohen is the Founder of SilverTree Intelligence Group and a highly experienced intelligence director and fraud specialist. With a distinguished career in due diligence and investigative services, he has advised Fortune 500 companies, private equity and venture capital firms, investment banks, high-net-worth individuals, law firms, real estate management firms, oil and mining enterprises, and some of the world’s largest insurance firms.
Most recently, Charles served as Director of Aon’s M&A and Transaction Solutions Corporate Intelligence practice, where he acted as a trusted advisor to clients and led and mentored a global team of intelligence analysts and cyber experts.
His extensive background in consulting, advisory, and investigations began at Deloitte, where he served as a Managing Investigator for the firm’s global parent office in New York. Over the years, he has conducted investigations for top firms, including the Mintz Group and Ethos Risk Services.
Charles’ investigative expertise spans a broad range of areas, including internal corporate investigations, litigation support, M&A due diligence, executive vetting, post-fraud assistance, asset tracing, witness location, interviewing, and trial monitoring.
He holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, is a Certified Fraud Examiner (CFE), a Certified Insurance Fraud Investigator (CIFI), a FCRA Certified Professional Background Screener, and a member of the Board of Regents for the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners.