Sep 4, 2026 – 9.00amThe KPMG audit scandal continues to reverberate through corporate Australia. Macquarie Group is only the latest to dump the firm as auditor. Macquarie non-executive director Michelle Hinchliffe – a conflicted former KPMG audit partner who concerned herself unduly with the company’s recent audit tender process – is now on professional deathwatch, likely to follow former Westpac director Peter Nash (and former KPMG chair) into the NED knackery. Macquarie chairman Glenn Stevens, meanwhile, is enormously diminished by his condescending dismissal of disquiet about the tender process as “silly talk”.KPMG’s primary misconduct was, of course, the gross breaches of trust committed against the firm’s clients by its senior audit leaders. Yet the secondary – and, as always, more damaging – misjudgement was the attempted cover-up, and the egregious treatment of the internal whistleblower whose complaint has now been proven spectacularly factual.Subscribe to gift this articleGift 5 articles to anyone you choose each month when you subscribe.Subscribe nowAlready a subscriber? Joe AstonColumnistJoe Aston is the founder of Rampart and the best-selling author of The Chairman’s Lounge: The inside story of how Qantas sold us out. From 2012 to 2023, Joe helmed The Australian Financial Review’s Rear Window column.Fetching latest articles