Brendan Lyon wants a 'conspiracy to tell the truth' to improve corporate ethics and productivity

Mr Lyon, 43, is the former partner at KPMG who stared down what he called a public service "hit squad" that tried to get him ousted when he refused to change a report assessing rail infrastructure changes.

And he said the "scar tissue" of the past five years of "professional hell" have become the wisdom which he can share.

He made headlines when he told a NSW parliamentary committee the honchos bullied him after he refused to remove discussion of safety problems, and change his team's analysis that found the Rail Asset Holding Entity (RAHE) would cost $5.3 billion, rather than save $4.7 billion.

After the upper executives bowed to government pressure over this "ten billion-dollar problem" Mr Lyon was removed from government work, and would leave KPMG.

He has recently been hired by UOW as a "Professor of Practice" working across business, law and accounting, and said he's looking forward to teaching professional ethics.

The Mercury asked Mr Lyon whether standing his ground was difficult, and why it's remarkable when someone actually acts with integrity - even to their own detriment.

"It's always difficult to be the only person saying something, and it's all the more difficult when the people saying the opposite are much more powerful than you in that context," he said.

"It was the toughest time I've had - it went for a very long time before it came out in public.

"The reality of the structure was that it was not fit for purpose at the time, it was not able to do the things that had been claimed.

"So that puts an enormous amount [of] pressure on, when you've banked in very large savings ... but they're not real, I guess that puts a huge amount of pressure, a tremendous amount of pressure on to 'make it true'."

If his case shone a light on how the government-consultant relationship worked, he said too often professional courage is not fostered.

"I guess the reasons people feel that it was an unusual step to do really reflects that [there's] often too little courage that's encouraged within organisations and there's often become a bit of complacency that whatever the price, it's right," he said.

"In this instance, this went straight to the heart of rail safety and safe operations, it went to the integrity of the budget.

"For me, it mattered because I didn't want to sign off on something which I knew was both fundamentally wrong but also fundamentally unsafe."

With a Senate inquiry into government use of consultants underway and $1 billion spent on their fees by Canberra last year, plus the ongoing PWC tax scandal, concern about their relationship with governments is strong.

"There's certainly very large questions to be asked about both the volume of money that's being spent, but also the integrity and expertise of the work that's being provided," Mr Lyon said.

"That exercise shouldn't be trying to prop up ... an appearance of good financial management when we've got huge debt that we've incurred as a nation, huge debts that we've incurred across the states.

"There has to be a conspiracy to tell the truth because that's what's going to engage the public on the things that need to change, particularly as it gets tougher in the next few years.

"I think the public have got some very legitimate questions to ask about what value of money they're getting [from consultants].

"I mean, that's effectively half of a nuclear submarine spent in one year on reports. I think that there should be a proper interrogation of the use of consultants across all levels of government.

"When we're starting to outsource the core functions of public service ... the Treasury should know how to account for public money. That should be absolutely its job."

He said his research at UOW would focus on those issues of professional ethics and and the maintenance of the standards across many professions.

"I hope to give [students] a sense that it is not only possible, it is important to be an independent professional.

"If you're a lawyer, if you're an accountant, if you're a business person, you've got to have your own ethics, it's going to matter more and more as we move through more difficult times.

"Giving students the confidence to be able to stand up for the things that they think are right is one of the things I really want to be a positive example for.

"It was obviously a very difficult time - the last five years has been very difficult time to me professionally, and that has flow-ons into personal life and other things.

"But I guess you get to the end of it and as you recover that scar tissue becomes the wisdom that you're able to then share with others.

"The more that we see good ethics individually corporations, within government departments, within consultancies, the more we're going to see good behaviours from those corporations, those departments, and those, and those accounting firms or other professional service firms."

He said PwC was the firm paying the reputational price now for not keeping its behaviour in ethical check.

"I think it's very easy to let standards slip. It's very easy to let profit trump ethics.

"But it's also a relatively short-term game - and one where eventually there are significant reactions just from real life."