Domestic and International Outbound

We offer tax, pensions and personal financial planning advice to a range of clients, including Irish-headquartered PLCs, large corporates and high-net-worth individuals.

In an ever-changing and complex tax and regulatory environment, our clients’ needs continuously evolve. Whether you are an Irish PLC, a multinational corporation, or a high-net-worth individual, our team is here to support you. We listen to your concerns and fully engage with your commercial objectives, allowing us to formulate the optimal tax and financial strategy for you and your business. Supporting you with implementation from cradle to grave, we ensure you meet all compliance obligations while optimising your tax and financial strategy to align with your commercial vision.

Understanding your priorities and supporting through change

Every business is different and every individual has unique tax and financial concerns, so we will always listen to you. Here are some of the challenges clients have shared.

Navigating international tax
Maximising tax incentives
Strategic pensions planning
Efficient wealth management
Driving management incentivisation
Optimising corporate deals
Navigating property deals
Implementing tax technology
Accelerating renewable energy and infrastructure

Navigating international tax

The volume and complexity of new regulations in the international tax space place unprecedented demands on our clients. From Pillar 2 to profit repatriation, you face legislation that may impact existing structures in the short-term and require urgent attention to ensure the optimal tax solution.

Communication across the business is critical, but resource constraints in in-house tax, finance and IT teams demand careful management of competing priorities. Meanwhile, the ‘day job’ continues with compliance issues such as year-end reporting, multiple filings and strategic considerations such as tax-efficient financing, overseas expansion, transfer pricing and acquisitions.

A trusted adviser is essential in this dynamic environment.

Maximising tax incentives

Tax incentives can provide key cash benefits to your business. It is important to ensure your business maximises its tax savings and cash benefits each year by realising its full entitlement to available incentives.

Research and Development (R&D) incentives in the form of credits and grants are available to businesses undertaking qualifying R&D activities and investments. The R&D tax credit rate is now 30% of qualifying expenditure, and when combined with R&D grants, can provide significant cash flow benefits.

When your business incurs capital expenditure on acquisitions, fit-outs, refurbishments, new constructions or new investment in plant and machinery, it is critical to identify the full entitlement to tax savings through capital allowances, and cash savings through R&D incentives, where appropriate.

Strategic pensions planning

We support the design of pension strategies that deliver optimal outcomes for our clients’ management and employees. The pensions landscape has become more complex, with critical decisions needed around employee benefits design, pension scheme structuring and master trusts, defined benefit scheme restructuring, preparing for auto-enrolment, member communication and post-retirement planning.

Company directors benefit from engaging in a comprehensive, holistic pensions and investment advice conversation to help them achieve optimal outcomes. Our specialist pensions and investment team collaborates with our colleagues throughout PwC to solve problems and deliver innovative solutions to our clients.

Efficient wealth management

Managing, growing and protecting wealth can be challenging, especially for high-net-worth individuals with global, diverse portfolios and assets. Whether you’re a private company owner, public company executive, entrepreneur, private equity partner, venture capitalist, or an individual or family who inherited wealth, it is vital to ensure your assets are held in a tax-efficient and well-structured manner.

It is also critical to have a robust succession plan that considers both your asset profile and the age and stage of your beneficiaries. We advise our clients on all aspects of tax compliance while formulating the most tax-efficient strategies around one-off transactions or longer-term issues such as succession and retirement. We also play a critical role in establishing and restructuring family offices.

Driving management incentivisation

In today’s competitive environment, your business must be managed by a team committed to delivering results, growing it and making it successful. Whether your business is a start-up looking to recruit a new executive or an established company seeking to retain its key people and align them to business goals, an effective incentive plan can be a cost-effective and tax-efficient way of meeting these objectives.

A critical factor in implementing management incentive schemes is to ensure that your business and the underlying shares are valued correctly. The value of the business will feed into the underlying value of the equity given to management as an incentivisation package. As such, having an accurate valuation for the underlying shares is imperative to avoid additional tax costs for your business.

Optimising corporate deals

Economic pressures and fluctuating inflation and interest rates have contributed to a variable mergers and acquisitions (M&A) market in recent years. Given the increased deal activity compared to prior years, the Irish transactions outlook appears optimistic.

While growth opportunities exist in the market, maximising deal value should remain a priority in every transaction. The ever-changing tax landscape can make understanding tax compliance and risk challenging. If you are a buyer or a seller anticipating an M&A-related transaction, our deals tax team can help you meet your tax obligations while managing the transaction’s tax impact on your business.

Navigating property deals

Tax is a crucial consideration at each stage of a property deal cycle. Businesses must identify and understand all tax issues associated with the property they are acquiring and reflect these appropriately in their modelling assumptions.

These tax issues can be materially different depending on the intention for the property (e.g. acquiring/developing for sale or holding as an investment) and financing considerations. Understanding and adopting the appropriate structure and complying with all relevant tax obligations through the life cycle is essential. Our dedicated Property Deals team can help you navigate this journey.

Implementing tax technology

The design and execution of the correct tax technology strategy is an organisational imperative as the volume and complexity of global tax compliance and regulatory requirements continue to increase.

The changing tax landscape, driven by a significant shift to technology-initiated challenges by tax authorities, presents an opportunity for tax functions to respond with a tech-powered approach and leverage more efficient processes and technology to support the tax function.

Accelerating renewable energy and infrastructure

The pace of renewable energy and infrastructure development must increase if we are to achieve net zero emissions by 2050. All companies have a role in supporting and helping lead the energy transition. Those businesses that can adapt, innovate and change will be the ones that get ahead in this transformational era, from greener supply to leaner demand — delivering radical decarbonisation by scaling up renewables, building greener and operating smarter.

Our DIO services

International tax

Our international tax team comprises dedicated specialist, technical and policy experts and a large cohort of client-facing professionals. We combine deep technical expertise with a practical understanding of implementation and compliance challenges. Leveraging our international network and experience at the OECD and governmental levels, we quickly dissect and communicate the complexities of new legislation, including Pillar 1, Pillar 2 and profit repatriation. Our team’s experience — gained through secondments to multinational organisations and Irish PLCs — ensures we keep practical commercial, legal and accounting challenges at the forefront when advising on financing, corporate restructuring, transfer pricing and international expansion.

Tax incentives

Our tax incentives team leverages unique expertise to optimise tax savings through R&D credits, grants and capital allowances. Comprising engineers, scientists and tax and accounting experts, we assist with all aspects of R&D credits and grant claims. This includes modelling R&D investments, designing R&D credit and grant processes and controls, and preparing supporting documentation for R&D credit and grant claims, and R&D Revenue interventions. Our surveying experts review expenditures on various capital projects, including new constructions, fit-outs and refurbishments and property acquisitions, to quantify the total value of entitlements to capital allowances and R&D incentives.

Pension planning

Our pensions team offers independent perspectives on pensions and investment needs backed by deep market knowledge, such as pension scheme structuring, costs, investment process and performance, member communication and technology propositions among others. We deliver high-value pension propositions by selecting and overseeing sustainable employee benefits solutions. This ensures a pension arrangement that provides the best outcomes for the workforce. Our expertise in the master trust field proves invaluable for employers seeking compliant and effective pension schemes. Additionally, we advise individual pension scheme members and high-net-worth individuals on specific pensions and investment needs — particularly at and after retirement. Our services include wealth management strategies, client reports on areas such as the gender pay gap, and consulting on risk benefits strategies like death in service and disability cover.

Wealth management

Our private client specialists help high-net-worth individuals, owner-managed businesses, family offices, law firms and partnerships manage their affairs efficiently and compliantly. We support clients at all life stages, offering retirement and succession planning services. We also help clients structure ownership of investments and property transactions and assist in business sales and asset separation on divorce. We earn trust by delivering discreet, professional and highly personalised services alongside robust commercial taxation strategies and solutions.

Management incentivisation

Our team has extensive experience advising on management incentivisation, tax-based valuations, and key employee retention. We help clients select the most appropriate equity incentive plan, considering your company structure, available finance and market position. A crucial step is a tax valuation of shares, which we provide to mitigate payroll risks and minimise negative consequences from Revenue audits or due diligence. We also keep you updated on reporting requirements and assist with drafting legal and company secretarial documentation.

Corporate deals

Our Deals Tax team comprises dedicated specialists experienced in working with medium and large corporates, Irish PLCs, private equity funds, semi-state bodies, and local investors on M&A transactions across various industries in the Irish and international markets. We assist with buy-side or sell-side tax due diligence, designing and implementing acquisition, divestment or financing structures. We also review tax elements of legal transaction documentation and financial models.

Property Deals

Our dedicated Property Deals team bring our experience and breadth of tax specialisms to guide you through the property deal cycle. Our breadth of experience across property deals includes tax due diligence, review of tax models, tax structuring advice and advising you on key considerations with exit options.

In the holding period our team can support you with tax advice in relation to entering into legal agreements (for example leases and development agreements), tax aspects of raising finance, preparing and implementing your ESG strategy, tax compliance obligations and much more. Our Capital Allowances team which includes experienced Chartered Quantity Surveyors can help you maximise the value of capital expenditure.

Tax technology

Our dynamic, partner-led team, with its diverse tax, finance and IT backgrounds, works across various industries to maximise operational effectiveness within tax functions. Our services include developing long-term tax function technology strategies and aligning these with wider business operating model objectives. We design, build and implement tax solutions leveraging best-in-class artificial intelligence, robotics, data extraction, transformation and analytics functionality. We implement market-leading tax compliance and reporting solutions as well as tax workflow management and PwC hosted Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions. We work with PwC alliance partners to optimise core systems and tax technology software to support the delivery of data in a fit-for-purpose tax process execution.

Renewables and infrastructure

Assessing costs associated with energy transition is critical for success. Our energy transition tax specialists help you evaluate upfront investments, operational expenses, maintenance costs and potential returns to enhance benefits and reduce risks.Our Energy Transition tax specialists help clients make energy transition add up to more, addressing the challenges and capitalising on the new opportunities that are opening up. We help clients structure investment and divestment in renewables energy projects, including vendor and buy-side due diligence and vendor assist services, understand the impact of green taxes, carbon taxes and availability of tax incentives, and review the tax aspects of investment models, fund flow and legal documentation to maximise value creation.