PwC buys Ellis Financial Systems for tax reporting rules

11 September 2015 Consultancy.uk

PwC has acquired Ellis Financial Systems for an undisclosed sum. The deal sees Ellis’ tax related software packages move to PwC. Companies around the world now face more stringent rules on tax related activities and the software and expertise from Ellis is expected to help PwC clients streamline their tax procedures.

Ellis Financial Systems, established in 1988 by Founder and CFO Christine Thompson, focuses primarily on tax, with the stated aim “to take away the pain of tax reporting and adhering to constantly changing tax legislation.” The firm provides a number of software based solutions that aim to provide reliability, flexibility, scope and cost efficiency, which are able to servicing 200,000 individual client accounts per night as of 2014, including CGCalc* and TaxReporter. Ellis Financial Systems operates in 12 jurisdictions as of 2014.

In order to better help its clients meet the new tax information reporting requirements coming into force in the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) and the OECD's Common Reporting Standard (CRS), PwC decided to acquire Ellis Financial Systems.

PwC buys Ellis Financial Systems

PwC will leverage Ellis’ multi-jurisdictional tax reporting expertise, with the firm’s software based solutions expected to be deployed to streamline the complex and demanding requirement from regulators that businesses produce detailed reports of their tax related activities to authorities globally.

“This investment means we can help clients who are looking for accurate and reliable solutions to these significant new tax transparency requirements. We think we can dramatically reduce the workload for financial institutions. Our software can process huge amounts of customer data in a secure way, for example it can generate up to 10,000 client tax reports per hour, tailored to the rules of different jurisdictions,” explains Stephen Camm, Tax Partner at PwC.

The firm will continue under the name PwC Tax Information Reporting and is operate from PwC's London office.

* CGCalc is a powerful and flexible rules-based, global tax calculation and modelling engine.