KPMG Australia's New CEO Has Spent 23 Years at KPMG
A short take from The Alumni Partners
KPMG Australia announced today that John Sams will be the firm’s new CEO, effective immediately. The board described the process as “rigorous,” with candidates considered “from within KPMG Australia, across the international network and externally.”
They picked their own CFO.
Sams joined KPMG UK as a graduate in 2003, transferred to KPMG Australia in 2006, made partner, ran the infrastructure advisory practice, became CFO in October 2025, and was given the additional title of COO on 3 June 2026. That last date matters. June 3 was five days after CEO Andrew Yates and head of audit Julian McPherson resigned. Whoever added “COO” to Sams’ title in the middle of a crisis was not responding to an organisational gap. They were staging a succession.
The selection panel that oversaw this “rigorous” search was chaired by Mike Ebeid, who joined KPMG’s board as an Independent Adviser in July 2025. Ebeid was appointed by Andrew Yates. Jennifer Westacott, also on the panel, was brought in as a Special Adviser to the firm on the same day, also by Yates. The people charged with finding a leader to fix the culture were themselves installed by the person who presided over the culture that failed.
None of this is unusual. It is, in fact, exactly how partnerships handle these transitions. And that is the problem.
When a firm promotes an insider after a governance crisis, it sends two messages to two audiences. To the outside world, it says: we searched widely and found the best candidate. To the partnership, it says: nothing about the power structure has changed. The second message is the one that matters, because the partnership is the institution. If the partners believed an outsider might arrive with a mandate to restructure compensation, dissolve practice groups, or fire senior partners who were complicit, the anxiety inside the firm would be genuine. The appointment of a 23-year KPMG veteran eliminates that anxiety.
Sams’ public statement follows the crisis-management script so closely it could have been generated from a template. He will be “courageous.” He will take “tough decisions.” He will address “culture, leadership and governance” with “resolve and endurance.” He will “deliver the Action Plan in full.” Every one of those phrases has appeared in at least five previous Big 4 post-scandal CEO statements over the past decade. I know, because I helped draft two of them.
The Action Plan itself runs to several pages of commitments: governance reform, culture review, enhanced controls, external oversight. It reads well. Action Plans always do. The question, as always, is whether the person tasked with executing the plan has the independence and the incentive to follow through when the reforms become inconvenient for the partners who elected them.
Sams was not elected by an independent board answerable to shareholders. He was selected by a board whose independent members were appointed by his predecessor, and he serves at the pleasure of a partnership that will judge him on revenue, retention, and the speed at which this scandal stops being a topic of conversation. Those incentives do not point toward deep reform. They point toward managed recovery: enough visible change to satisfy regulators and the parliamentary committee, not so much that the partnership’s economics are disrupted.
I hope I am wrong about Sams. A 23-year insider who actually forces the hard changes would be more effective than any outside appointment, because he knows where the problems are buried. But the track record of internal crisis appointments at the Big 4 is not encouraging. The firm needs to ask itself an honest question: if it had genuinely been willing to hire an outsider, would the process have looked any different from the one that produced this result?
Has your firm ever conducted an “external search” that ended with an internal candidate? What did the partnership read into it? We already know the answer at ours.