It's "island rules" for PwC and its clients in the Caribbean
PwC does all kind of business in Barbados.
“Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?” - Groucho Marx, Duck Soup
Behind the corporate façade all is not what it seems. It is no secret that some of the world’s largest companies such as Omnicom, Uber, and Apple take advantage of the complexity of the global financial system to reduce taxes and benefit financially. It only takes a quick peek behind grandiose, buzzword-bingo corporate initiatives such as PricewaterhouseCoopers'(PwC) Tomorrow Takes Trust to see the potential misuse of the Internal Revenue Code and violations of ethics and auditor independence rules and norms related to accounting and tax services.
The rules are vague on purpose, and that makes it difficult for anyone, including courts, to conclude wrongdoing. We are making no such accusations but, instead, continuing to raise awareness among financial stakeholders of how multinational companies operate, especially in the tax avoidance space.
PwC in Australia has been caught up in an unrelenting barrage of bad press over conflicts of interest related to selling aggressive tax avoidance strategies. But this isn’t the only time when, or place where, this subject has come up. Data collected by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), and in US and European corporate registries, show these are not isolated cases and they are not relegated to the past.
From Barbados with love: Vacation destination, shell corporation center
PwC Services Corporation is an entity registered in Barbados with the same address as the PwC member firm headquarters in Barbados. This is the address for a plethora of shell companies that seek to take advantage of Barbados’s tax rate being among the lowest in the world. Furthermore, the separate PwC legal entity operates like a factory for establishing shell corporations for publicly traded companies, private companies, and wealthy individuals. (In the LuxLeaks cases, PwC Luxembourg also provided services to set up the shell companies required to effect the revenue and income shifting strategies it was selling.)
