The Big Four accountants and the $480 billion global tax evasion industry
PwC and the Big 4 have been in full defence mode before the Senate’s inquiry into consultants, and for good reason. They are protecting the global tax avoidance trade which earns them billions.
The scandalous behaviour and lack of accountability of the Big Four accountancy firms – Deloitte, KPMG, PwC and EY – remains a regular feature of the news cycle as the Senate Inquiry into consultants draws to a close. While government consulting has been the fast-growth business for the Big 4, their bread and butter remains the other two divisions: audit and tax (avoidance) advice.
So it is that, despite the demands of the Senate for release of the Linklaters report into the PwC scandal in Australia – PwC Global had commissioned the report – the firm has refused to provide it.
As David Cay Johnston, US journalist and tax expert told his subscribers this week, “PwC is doing everything possible to make sure that big US and UK names – of partners and client companies – won’t hit the headlines outside of Australia.
An email cache uncovered by AFR showed that PwC had quickly put together an international swat team, “Project North America”, to market the intel to multinationals interested in avoiding new Australian taxes … PwC Australia had charged $2.5 million in fees in 2016 to advise 14 clients how to sidestep new multinational tax avoidance laws based on the intelligence shared by tax partner [Peter] Collins”.
Time for reform
Together with several critical accounting colleagues from Macquarie University, Sydney University, the University of Wollongong, and the Open University (UK), we have been making a series of parliamentary submissions, as well as writing popular and journal articles documenting these issues and recommending to the government a series of substantive reforms to the way auditing, accounting and consultancies are performed and operate in Australia.
MWM has been instrumental in drawing attention to the many questionable, unethical and even illegal practices in which the Big Four have allegedly been involved over many years. With this in mind, we have been invited by MWM to draw readers’ attention to some of this work in the hope that it might provide some more impetus for reform.
https://michaelwest.com.au/pwc-the-big-four-and-the-480-billion-tax-avoidance-industry/