The latest scandal to engulf a big four accounting firm — the alleged accessing of Anthony Albanese’s bank details by workers at EY — is further proof the advisory giants need to be weaned off government and business teats.

They can’t be trusted with the milk.

If charges levelled against the allegedly nosy EY graduate on secondment at Commonwealth Bank are proved, it will be proof that they were, at best, complete morons.

CBA’s security is amongst the best in the world and Matt Comyn himself can’t get within three open desktop tabs of a prominent BSB without a red flag going up.

The Prime Minister’s bank details? Don’t worry about Wayne from IT demanding a please explain; you’re going to have ASIO agents rappelling from Black Hawks.

That the EY grads, one of whom has been charged by police, apparently didn’t realise this, is troubling for two reasons.

First, because they were sent to CBA to “help” with the bank’s technology systems despite clearly not having the first clue about cybersecurity. What on earth was CBA paying for?

Second, because their alleged arrogance and sense of entitlement is symptomatic of EY, KPMG, Deloitte and PwC’s behaviour ever since these firms expanded from traditional audit and risk functions to the all-encompassing business model of “professional services”.

The corporate world became addicted to outsourcing its problems to the big four. After hollowing out the skills base of the public service, so did governments.

The world handed EY, KPMG, PwC and Deloitte a set of skeleton keys to its public and private institutions and trusted the partners to only look in certain rooms and not talk about what they saw.

The propensity for corruption was bad enough when they were just auditors.

Getting paid by a company to audit its accounts and not letting that revenue affect your judgment?

Please, maybe if the accountant is Marcus Aurelius.

Walk into any Rockpool restaurant anywhere in Australia at any time of day and there will be an audit partner paying for a dinner they just enjoyed with a client whose books they are examining without fear or favour (but plenty of Chateau Rothschild flavour).

And we wonder why a few years ago EY’s global audit teams “missed” the fact international payments giant Wirecard had faked billions of euros in revenue.

A few years before that, we wondered how Deloitte “missed” the fact $US4.5 billion had been misappropriated from a Malaysian State development fund (1MDB) it had audited for five successive years.

Reach further into history, but closer to home, and you will see KPMG was the auditor of Laurie Connell’s Rothwells Merchant Bank — the collapse of which was the pump-primer for WA Inc.

On top of the self-evident conflict of interest presented when the gamekeeper gets paid by the poacher, there’s the more sinister and bald-faced corruption opportunity afforded by sharing audit information with other divisions.

We’re told there are sophisticated internal systems in place to prevent an auditor telling a colleague something that could advantage them when pitching for new work.

The so-called internal Chinese wall (which, for reasons of nonsensical political correctness is now called an ethical barrier) was and is a myth. People gossip.

It’s a basic human compulsion which non-disclosure agreements are powerless to stop.

KPMG proved that with the ongoing scandal involving auditors leaking confidential information about the state of the books of companies so colleagues could win new business with those companies.

Three years ago, PwC proved it when a partner advising the Federal Government about how to close tax loopholes gave the skinny to colleagues whose clients were leaping through said loopholes.

The entire system is predicated on people in the big four firms being stoic monks.

Sorry, they’re just people.

People with debts and gambling problems.

People who are alcoholics going through divorce.

People who have kids in trouble.

People who take the occasional moral mulligan and justify it by saying “well, everyone else does it”.