PwC tax leaks scandal: Deloitte leaders Adam Powick and Tom ...

“What has transpired is deeply troubling and disappointing and is justifiably attracting significant scrutiny and reaction. Our response is focused on reaffirming we have the appropriate culture, controls and governance in place to prevent a similar situation ever occurring at Deloitte,” they wrote.

The comments follow KPMG’s leaders emailing all staff on Thursday morning to remind them to act “ethically and in the public interest”, in a firm-wide email sent in response to the PwC matter.

The federal government’s response to the PwC scandal escalated dramatically this week, as Treasury referred the matter to the Australian Federal Police to consider opening a criminal investigation and the Department of Finance effectively banned the firm from winning new work by ordering officials to consider confidentiality breaches when evaluating bids.

The Deloitte leaders said there had been an “adverse reaction to PwC Australia’s tax confidentiality breaches”.

“The behaviour of those responsible was clearly unethical and unacceptable, but there is no joy watching the reputation of talented and capable PwC partners and people being tainted by the actions of a few,” they wrote in the all-partner email.

Under previous leadership, Deloitte had threatened to step up its fight with the corporate regulator over its audit inspection program findings if ASIC had allowed rival firm PwC to publish its superior audit quality rating.

The firm eventually cooperated with ASIC’s enhanced audit quality disclosure regime, which now details the results for the individual firms.