The Federal Court found on Friday that PwC incorrectly claimed privilege over 58 per cent of the documents it studied.
Big four consultancy PwC incorrectly claimed legal privilege over the majority of documents it tried to keep from the Tax Office over its work for a multinational client, the Federal Court has ruled inJustice Mark Moshinsky found on Friday that 58 per cent of PwC’s claims of privilege over a slew of documents regarding tax advice it gave meat production giant JBS were wrong, after the ATO claimed it involved lawyers in the work purely to cover it in “a cloak of privilege”.
It comes as Australia’s consulting and legal firms increasingly encroach on each other’s turf, sparking concerns that both are doing so partly to sell the benefits of legal privilege to clients.The court selected 116 “sample” documents from the 44,000 over which PwC claimed privilege over to analyse, finding that 61 were not privileged, 49 were, and six partially were.
“These conclusions have been reached through a process of consideration of each of the sample documents,” he wrote.
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