Tuesday, January 17, 2017

PricewaterhouseCoopers Buys 600 Accountants From General Electric (GE)

In a move that had escaped my attention, a major action in the corporate accountancy biz.
Thanks to a reader.
From Accounting Today:

PwC to hire GE tax team
PricewaterhouseCoopers is bringing aboard more than 600 tax professionals from General Electric and acquiring GE’s tax technologies, the firm announced Thursday.
The deal involves tax professionals from 42 different nations. PwC already possesses the biggest tax practice in the U.S. and internationally, with 41,000 tax professionals working in 157 countries.

The sophisticated tax strategies used by GE’s extensive tax unit has gained notoriety in recent years for lowering the corporate giant’s effective tax rate to nearly zero on billions of dollars in income. Over the past 10 years, according to the advocacy group Citizens for Tax Justice, GE paid an effective federal income tax rate of -1.6 percent on $58 billion in profits, while over the past 15 years, its federal income tax rate was only 5.2 percent.

The deal with PwC stemmed from GE’s re-evaluation of its current and future delivery of its global tax services. The new Global Enterprise Tax Solutions team will be part of PwC Tax and will provide managed services to not only GE, but other PwC clients. The five-year, renewable agreement takes effect April 1, 2017....MORE