Leveraging data analytics in modern tax function

Investigating geographical footprints of income shifting by multinational enterprises. PwC owns a large data set across all industries in Canada from its tax consulting engagements and annual standard tax filings from clients. This growing data source is an opportunity for accurate tax benchmarking, trend analysis and gaining deeper insights by transforming them into market differentiating knowledge that can be dynamically shared and accessed by multiple teams. The company has started a streamline of projects firm wide to elicit value and insights by integrating data analytics into multiple functions. This project will be one of the initial studies of how data analytics can play an integral role in tax functions and improve tax consulting planning processes. We will investigate geographic income shifting by North American corporations in response to worldwide changes in tax rates, monetary policies and also discover new factors apart from the traditional variables that drives companies to restructure their operations geographically in order to optimize their effective tax rates. Many previous studies indicate differential changes in tax rates provide incentives for income shifting in the past. TO BE CONT’D

Faculty Supervisor:

Kenneth Jackson

Student:

Sooa Lim

Partner:

PricewaterhouseCoopers

Discipline:

Computer science

Sector:

Information and communications technologies

University:

University of Toronto