William Doran - PricewaterhouseCoopers
Although I was recruited by PwC in 2002, the firm sponsored me to stay on at DCU for a further year to complete a Masters in Accounting. It meant that when I joined, I was exempt from the first set of the AITI tax exams and all but the finals of my accountancy exams. Although people working in Tax and Legal Services can just study for the tax exams, I wanted to do both tax and accounting.
I chose a career in taxtion because I was attracted by the variety of the work in tax and I wasn’t proved wrong - on any given day I could be working on 8 or 9 clients at a time and doing different things on each one.
Within my specific group, we offer two main services to our clients – compliance and consultancy. Our compliance services help clients compute their tax liabilities correctly and on time. Sometimes this means that we calculate the tax liability for the company, in other cases we review the tax computation that the client has prepared and submit this to the Revenue Authorities on their behalf.
The consultancy services we provide may vary from the personal tax issues of senior management and Directors to large, complex company reorganisations. The advice we give is often of a very technical nature, relying on our knowledge and interpretation of the tax legislation. We look at what taxes would apply if a company decides to structure transactions in a certain way and advise them on the most tax efficient method. The best thing about working here is that I spend a lot of time with clients and I’ve been given ownership and responsibility early on.
One of my most interesting projects to date was advising an Irish company, which was loss making, but with a profit making subsidiary in the UK. So the client was paying tax in the UK but as a group overall they had losses available, which were not being utilised. We helped the client look at ways of minimising their group tax charge and how to get income back to Ireland from the UK.