Scyne Advisory adds Matthew Zappulla and Jessica Lambous
In a contextually key appointment, public sector consultancy Scyne Advisory has brought in former Auditing and Assurance Standards Board technical director Matthew Zappulla as client risk & quality lead.
Testing out its own strict cooling off rules, the consulting firm has also added former Victorian public servant and Commonwealth Games organising committee member Jessica Lambous as a partner – or now ‘managing director’.
The appointments come shortly after Scyne’s six-month anniversary, with the AFR reporting the PwC breakaway is already on track to recover around a third of its previous revenues – or ~$200 million – from almost 500 projects.
As a likely unnecessary recap, Scyne Advisory was born from the PwC government tax breach scandal. Sold to Allegro Funds for $1, the reshaped entity enacted a number of governance reforms in a bid to regain favour. These included organising its structure in more of a corporate model than partnership one, and introducing a ‘cooling off period’ before ex-politicians and public servants could join.
Lambous joined the firm in May after spending more than two decades in and around various Victorian government departments, but most recently as a committee and board member. Earlier, she served as chief finance & procurement director at the Department of Jobs, Precincts and Regions, before then going on to lead corporate & finance for the 2026 Commonwealth Games organising committee.
Another notable aspect of her appointment, Lambous has joined Scyne’s finance, risk and cybersecurity teams as a ‘managing director’ – the equivalent title now being used in place of ‘partner’. While likely only symbolic in practice, the change aims to reflect the firm’s efforts to move away from the traditional partnership model and distinguish Scyne from its closest competitors.
Providing another point of interest, Matthew Zappulla meanwhile returns to the fold as client risk & quality leader after spending the best part of two decades at PwC until 2014. From there, he served as Victorian assistant auditor general for standards & quality, before taking up his long-held post as technical director for the federal government’s Auditing and Assurance Standards Board (AUASB) at the start of 2017.
In addition to the more than 1,000 partners and staff who originally shifted from PwC, Scyne said that it had welcomed 50 new professionals since its launch, with other recent hires including former PwC assurance senior manager Kate Bethell, who joins from a chief audit executive role with the Western Australian finance department, and Daniel Borg, who crosses as head of digital workplaces after two decades with PwC.
