The Tax Justice Network blog has its interpretation of the Public Accounts Committee / PWC story up on its blog this morning.
This blog offers a new interpretation of PWC:
And it also offers an explanation:
PWC, which has had close political relations with both the current government and the preceding Labour administrations headed by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, and with the UK's Treasury (which is heavily infiltrated by City of London interests), responded aggressively to the Luxembourg Leak revelations, accusing Antoine Deltour of “stealing” information of a commercially confidential nature.
Earlier this week, this blogger met with a senior PWC official who repeated this accusation and absolutely denied that Deltour's actions served public interest. The official also stated that the public had no legitimate reason to know what tax deals were being struck between governments and multinational companies, even when those deals involved major multi-year upstream oil & gas and mining contracts.
PWC and other leading accounting firms have for decades been engaging in an organised and calculated way to deprive citizens throughout Europe and other continents of hundreds of billions of tax revenue. They represent a threat to democracy. TJN heartily endorses the suggestion by Margaret Hodge MP, chair of the parliamentary PAC, that governments — and the European Commission — should immediately take action to ban PWC from all areas of government procurement.
I agree.
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When I read the kind of comment in the second paragraph of the excerpt above, it reminds me of something that’s become increasingly obvious over the past decade and more: that there are a large number of people in the business “community” who have no understanding and/or interest in democracy EXCEPT as a periodic device to give legitimacy to a government (of whatever party) that can then be used to promote, develop and protect their interests. That’s it. Period.
Compared to the influence the trade union movement has on either the Labour party specifically or government more generally there’s simply no comparison. Strange therefore that we hear so much about the influence of unions and so little about the influence of PWC et al. Again, if Labour had any balls they’d announce the intention to set up a Commission to investigate this, with thorough vetting of all those on it to ensure they are free from the vast and corrosive influence of these organisations.
Agreed
I don’t even think these accounting leaders know what conscience means. And the professional bodies do not monitor this lack of conscience. This is a public scandal of epic proportions.
Why won’t they name the senior PwC official? Is it a secret who it was ?
Dear All,
It is a shame how these multinational tax manipulators like PWC and their fiends are abusing our most basic democratic rights of “equal treatment in front of the laws”.
Is it acceptable to oversqueez with taxes the humble employee of a supermarket , and on the other side exemp multinationals by interpreting exessively any tax law wordings?
What do the words of equality, fraternity and liberty still mean in front of these horrendous exesses?
We need a change urgently in sll EEC countries and Oecd.
Why blaming the weak tax reforms in Greece?
Shouldn’t we start first at our homes?
This inequality is simply disgusting in our societies
Nothing seems to have changed since Enron.
One accountancy firm went bust as a result but others still seem to be up their usual shenanigans.
I did a finance module on my MBA about accountancy. I cannot say for sure that I fully understood the methodologies that I was exposed to but I was left with the overwhelming impression that accountancy in business practice is shall we say one of the most dubious of functions. Everything seems to be opaque. It seems more like a game of chess than a means to see the truth of any financial situation.
Accountants seem to be able to create artificial worlds – perhaps we are about to see this in the Tesco case that it heading our way.
I don’t wish to seem to be denigrating the profession (I’ve worked with and do work with some great accountants and I’m sure that’s the case everywhere) but I feel that the profession and the standards it must be working to need a radical technical and ethical overhaul pronto.
The narrative of accounting is almost entirely false
You are right