Accounting firm
Suspected tax evasion: raid on consulting firm PwC
Of all people, clients of the auditing company PwC are said to have evaded taxes. It is a matter of millions of euros in damage.
© Emmanuel Dunand / AFP
The consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) is one of the largest accounting firms in the world. Now the public prosecutor’s office in Frankfurt is investigating, of all things, possible tax evasion.
Auditing firms are actually intended to advise their clients on billing and tax matters and to ensure that everything is done correctly. But precisely in connection with advice on tax proceedings, employees of the company PwC are said to have evaded sales tax in the double-digit millions.
According to the Frankfurt Public Prosecutor’s Office on Tuesday, there is a suspicion that consulting services provided in Germany between 2012 and 2017 were billed via the Swiss branch. The investigators put the tax damage for the German tax authorities at more than eleven million euros.
Tax investigation and BKA with extensive searches
In search of evidence, there was an extensive search in several federal states on Tuesday with the support of the Hessian tax authorities and the Federal Criminal Police Office, the investigators said. On suspicion of tax evasion in particularly serious cases, the apartments of four senior employees and four former senior employees of the auditing company – not named by the public prosecutor’s office – were searched. There were further searches in business premises in Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Düsseldorf, Hanover and Stuttgart.
PwC: “We cooperate fully with the authorities”
A spokesman for PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) confirmed the searches. “Public prosecutor’s investigations come up again and again. We have precise processes and clear procedures that are known to our employees; we cooperate fully with the authorities,” said the spokesman on request.
According to the Public Prosecutor’s Office, the accused between the ages of 50 and 67 are suspected of having “untruthfully declared the services provided to the tax offices as those of a Swiss company in the joint international network”. “The inclusion of the Swiss company is said to have served exclusively to conceal the advisory services in Switzerland and thus to evade sales tax,” the investigators explained.