There's a good article in the Sunday Times today by Rob Watts that notes:

Officials at HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) said they had launched 11,582 investigations into offshore accounts using data obtained from Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds TSB, HBOS and Royal Bank of Scotland over the past two years.

In a note obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, officials said that between now and 2010 "79,000 further cases are being held, pending a decision on which intervention will be most appropriate. Further cases are likely to be identified".

Which you'd think just about any reasonable person on earth would applaud. After all, this is a case of the authorities cracking down on crime.

But then PWC step in. As the article notes:

Stephen Camm, who leads the tax-investigations business at Price Waterhouse Coopers, the accountant, said that HMRC would struggle to examine the details of so many individuals.

He said: "The Revenue has a real dilemma here: they will need an awful lot of extra resources to look into these cases.

"The Revenue has already asked for a great deal of client information from banks and other organisations in recent years. Should they be asking for all this extra information when inspectors seem to be struggling to process all the information they already have?"

YES. YES. YES. Of course they should.

So what are you trying to say PWC? That you support tax evasion? Because I'll tell you: that's what most of us think to be the case already. You are, after all, a major operator in all the world's tax havens and it's really hard to find any justification for that. Nor have you tried to justify your presence in Liechtenstein And when you say things like this, well the case looks pretty open and shut to me. Saying HMRC should not investigate tax crime is like asking for a licence to continue doing it.

Does the accounting have any ethics left? In the case of PWC I seriously doubt it.