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The University of Technology Sydney denied the existence of a KPMG spreadsheet ranking the research performance of academics, in breach of its EBA, until it was forced to release it. By Rick Morton.

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Exclusive: University sought secret KPMG staff spreadsheet

The University of Technology Sydney’s central campus.

Credit: Andy Roberts / UTS

University of Technology Sydney repeatedly denied the existence of a “master” spreadsheet that targeted individual researchers in its $100 million restructure and misled a barrister completing an internal review about the institution’s legal compliance.

Now, after months of denial, the university has been forced to hand over a version of the spreadsheet it said never “eventuated”.

Consulting firm KPMG has so far been paid more than $7 million by the university to advise on its sustainability restructure. The production of a “master excel spreadsheet ... of academic staff members that are not meeting research expectations” was listed as a requirement from late 2024. Documents say it was completed and handed over by Christmas.

In May this year, however, it was suddenly listed as no longer required, despite UTS vice-chancellor Professor Andrew Parfitt signing a March contract extension with the firm that listed the work as finished.

The Saturday Paper first reported the work order for the spreadsheet in May, when it revealed the full scope of KPMG’s work at the university. An academic noted anonymously at the time that if management had solely relied on a list of “underperforming” research staff to make redundancies, then this would likely be in breach of the enterprise bargaining agreement. Performance management is supposed to be dealt with separately, via a documented process under the EBA.

“That’s when the funny business began,” another academic with knowledge of the saga tells The Saturday Paper.

“And now we can see all of the contortions being made by management to try and keep this thing out of public view. It’s ugly to watch and doesn’t inspire confidence in the already suspect restructure.”

National Tertiary Education Union branch officials at UTS, and another person, attempted to use the New South Wales right to information laws, known as the Government Information (Public Access) Act, or GIPA, to access information about the master spreadsheet. Both also emailed for clarification based on the responses they received.

On June 30 this year, NTEU UTS branch vice-president and academic Dr Simon Knight emailed UTS head of corporate information Deborah Naray saying he had “become aware of some inconsistencies in information received or published” and wanted to raise them with her.

Knight referred to an earlier email from an anonymous source – also obtained by The Saturday Paper – in which that person referred to a previous GIPA release that included a new super contract with KPMG signed by Parfitt in March. That contract explicitly mentioned the existence of the spreadsheet.

Naray had earlier written to that anonymous source: “I can advise however, that this master spreadsheet did not eventuate and was no longer required as an output of the OSI [Operational Sustainability Initiative] program.”

This means KPMG was either paid for a key milestone that was never finished or the spreadsheet was completed but was deemed not necessary after being sent to university management. Neither scenario paints a flattering portrait of UTS management.

The anonymous correspondent, with the union’s backing, asked for an explanation.

“Further, I note that according to the documents released in response to the GIPA request, the RP&I [Research Productivity & Investment] program was delivered to UTS on 12 December 2024,” they wrote. “Specifically, Activity 1.1 (validate diagnostic analysis) was shown as completed at that point, and this activity explicitly includes a ‘stage gate’ for final approval of the list of Level C to Level E, SSS, and SSG staff not meeting research expectations (as documented in the program milestone materials).

“This appears to directly contradict the recent advice that such a list ‘did not eventuate’. Could you please clarify this apparent inconsistency?”

After further inquiries and the release of more documents it is now clear at least one version of the spreadsheet was handed to the deputy vice-chancellor research, Professor Kate McGrath, as far back as October last year. She’d asked for it and later discussed it with the VC himself.

“Hi [redacted], I assume you have a list of all the individuals from level A through level E that are in the bottom 25% or have no research [income] or research outputs,” McGrath wrote to a KPMG consultant on October 17 last year. “Would you be able to send that to me so I can get a sense of this.”

This email was sent on the same day that UTS leaders were attending a “retreat” on campus to discuss strategy and the sustainability restructure. Required reading for the full-day retreat included an October council update on research investment ahead of a two-hour presentation by KPMG on “sustainable finance planning”. This presentation included “supporting analysis” from the firm on each strategic lever, including the work done on research output under the RP&I stream.

Parfitt, McGrath and the VC’s chief of staff, Michelle Callan, were all listed as in attendance that day.

The KPMG consultant responded to McGrath’s email the following week.

“We hope that you are well and that you had a lovely weekend,” they wrote on October 21. “For the initial diagnostic analysis work, we focused on identifying Level D and E researchers only who are in the bottom 25th quartile for research income and publications, and the list of Level D and E researchers with zero income and / or zero publication across the same three year period.

“We have included Staff ID, Name, Position, Grade Level, Position Type, Faculty, Count of Publications, Sum of Fractionised Research Income, and FTE value.”

The attached spreadsheet, which was password protected, contained 18 pages of individual staff names.

On November 4, McGrath wrote to three KPMG consultants saying that the “numbers etc all look right”, but “unfortunately many of the named people on both lists appear to be much more active than what this profiling is indicated [sic]”. She singled out one person in the bottom quartile “who has published well over [redacted] this year, supervises students and brings in $”.

“I spoke to the VC this morning and he has agreed that Scott McWhirter, copied here now comes in to exploring this with me,” she said.

Almost three weeks later, on November 22, KPMG status reports released under an information request confirm that McGrath was briefed on the methodology.

“Follow up meeting with Kate … where our understanding of the analysis was validated and confirmed by Kate.”

Despite the involvement of the most senior people responsible at UTS and this email trail, earlier GIPA requests never identified this or any other version of the “master” spreadsheet and for months UTS repeatedly claimed it did not exist.

On July 1, UTS strategic communications director Ann-Maree Ashburn drafted a proposed response to the NTEU’s questions for the Vice-Chancellor’s Office to send out. It included a new version of the denial: “No such spreadsheet has been provided to [sic] KPMG and no staff have been individually identified in the academic workforce work.”

This was not entirely true. About the same time, UTS hired an external barrister from 5 Wentworth chambers, Hugh Stowe, to conduct an internal review of the previous GIPA decisions. When he asked for the same clarification, he was also not told that a version of the spreadsheet existed.

“To facilitate the completion of the review, I would be grateful if you could arrange for the provision of the following responses,” Stowe wrote to UTS senior legal counsel Andrew Mullen on July 7.

Quoting the internal review request from Simon Knight and seeking the UTS explanation, Stowe wrote: “Am I correct in assuming that UTS’s position is that it is not contested that the Master Spreadsheet would be subject to disclosure (if it existed), but the simple fact is that the document does not exist?”

In red, Naray responded to the barrister, “Yes that is correct”. “Simon claims it should have been provided as part of his requests for ‘reports from KPMG’. Evidence in ‘EXTRACT from status report 2May2025’ clearly states that KPMG will not be developing this spreadsheet.

“Therefore, the spreadsheet was Not a report to UTS from KPMG. Separately, we have been advised that the spreadsheet was not produced.”

Naray told Stowe she had received this from Parfitt’s chief of staff, and the director of the university portfolio management office, Sarah Meaney.

“Sarah had advised that the spreadsheet was not produced, and had also provided the extract from the status report as evidence that KPMG were no longer required to provide it,” she wrote. Only three days earlier, Naray had written to Knight: “In considering those questions for the purposes of your internal review, we identified that there was no spreadsheet.”

This is also what the final review from Stowe found but on the basis of incomplete information provided by UTS.

While the internal review was being finalised, Naray was dealing with a new GIPA application from an unnamed person. The request was initially rejected as being too large. With a revised scope, Naray emailed that this would restrict the request “to only the most recent version of relevant documents from 2025 and removes the previous request for an excel spreadsheet that contains the list of proposed … academic staff members that are not meeting research expectations”.

At the end of July, a final response to the clarifications sought by Knight and the other person were being prepared. UTS chief legal counsel Kylie Gould reviewed the statement. So did KPMG. Vice-chancellor Parfitt directed it be sent out by his acting chief of staff, Danielle Woolley, herself a partner at KPMG until she was hired by the university.

“I can confirm that no master spreadsheet of research staff as referred to was produced or delivered in partnership with KPMG,” Woolley wrote, without indicating whether any versions of the spreadsheet existed. “I trust the above clarifies the matter.”

Now it has been produced and confirmed delivered, although the university maintains it was never finished and was not used. By way of explanation, UTS inserted a “context” page just before the sudden appearance of the Excel spreadsheet and emails between McGrath and KPMG.

“As part of this work at that time KPMG began developing a list of D to E researchers but the Deputy Vice Chancellor Research intervened, and upon reviewing and seeking to validate this data with our own research data insights team, the work was discontinued,” the university says in its explanation.

Instead, it says, the university used “aggregate” data from its own internal systems “in order to consider whether any proposed OSI changes would impact on our research activities”.

Coincidentally, UTS says, the resulting insights are the same as if they had relied on the KPMG analysis.

A spokesperson for the university told The Saturday Paper in a statement UTS only “became aware of the existence of a list of researchers prepared by KPMG in 2024” while responding to the most recent GIPA request, released this month.

“UTS has previously responded to GIPA and information requests relating to KPMG documents,” the spokesperson said.

“However, those responses did not include the list that has now been provided via this more recent GIPA request. This may have been due to search parameters being too broad, inaccurate assessment of the documents or genuine human error.

“UTS takes its GIPA obligations very seriously. We can absolutely rule out any perceived or actual conflicts of interest.”

The day after UTS was forced to release the long-hidden paper trail, the Senate Education and Employment Legislation Committee released an interim report from its inquiry into the quality of governance at Australian higher education providers. It found a sector almost allergic to transparency even as its leaders claim to have “robust” governance processes and sufficient oversight.

“This is in stark contrast to the many submitters outside of the management branch of universities who provided their accounts of poor governance at many institutions, which have led to ‘systemwide and systemic breaches of workplace standards’, poor accountability for decisions and a loss of public faith in the higher education sector,” the report says.

“The committee recognises the important role universities play as autonomous, self-governing institutions. However, this autonomy must be exercised in line with the public interest and balanced with clear standards of transparency and accountability.”

On September 17, phase one of the restructure KPMG was instrumental in designing was released to UTS staff and the world: 1100 subjects will be axed, the entire School of Education terminated and 160 full-time equivalent jobs gone. About 240 more will follow as the university moves into its second tranche of cuts: professional staff.

Two days later, an alternative plan developed by six senior accounting and economics academics in the UTS School of Business suggested they could realise accumulated surpluses over the 2025–2030 period of $168.4 million, compared with about $205 million in the management proposal, but with only 84 redundancies in central administration instead of 400 across the entire university.

“Our conclusion is that UTS is not currently facing a genuine financial crisis and that this is not the time for a radical reorganisation or downsizing of the University,” the academics wrote. “In fact, such an approach would subject the University’s reputation to significant risk.”

The plan was delivered in a 90-minute face-to-face meeting to the professoriate but, despite requesting alternative proposals, staff are not convinced the vice-chancellor is willing to change course.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on September 27, 2025 as "Exclusive: University sought secret KPMG staff spreadsheet".

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