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Business consulting services
Our business consulting services can help you improve your operational performance and productivity, adding value throughout your growth life cycle.
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Business process solutions
We can help you identify, understand and manage potential risks to safeguard your business and comply with regulatory requirements.
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Business risk services
The relationship between a company and its auditor has changed. Organisations must understand and manage risk and seek an appropriate balance between risk and opportunities.
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Cybersecurity
As organisations become increasingly dependent on digital technology, the opportunities for cyber criminals continue to grow.
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Forensic and investigation services
At Grant Thornton, we have a wealth of knowledge in forensic services and can support you with issues such as dispute resolution, fraud and insurance claims.
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Mergers and acquisitions
Globalisation and company growth ambitions are driving an increase in M&A activity worldwide. We work with entrepreneurial businesses in the mid-market to help them assess the true commercial potential of their planned acquisition and understand how the purchase might serve their longer- term strategic goals.
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Recovery and reorganisation
Workable solutions to maximise your value and deliver sustainable recovery
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Transactional advisory services
We can support you throughout the transaction process – helping achieve the best possible outcome at the point of the transaction and in the longer term.
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Valuations
We provide a wide range of services to recovery and reorganisation professionals, companies and their stakeholders.
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IFRS
The International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) are a set of global accounting standards developed by the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) for the preparation of public company financial statements. At Grant Thornton, our IFRS advisers can help you navigate the complexity of financial reporting from IFRS 1 to IFRS 17 and IAS 1 to IAS 41.
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Audit quality monitoring
Having a robust process of quality control is one of the most effective ways to guarantee we deliver high-quality services to our clients.
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Global audit technology
We apply our global audit methodology through an integrated set of software tools known as the Voyager suite.
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Corporate and business tax
Our trusted teams can prepare corporate tax files and ruling requests, support you with deferrals, accounting procedures and legitimate tax benefits.
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Direct international tax
Our teams have in-depth knowledge of the relationship between domestic and international tax laws.
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Global mobility services
Through our global organisation of member firms, we support both companies and individuals, providing insightful solutions to minimise the tax burden for both parties.
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Indirect international tax
Using our finely tuned local knowledge, teams from our global organisation of member firms help you understand and comply with often complex and time-consuming regulations.
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Innovation and investment incentives
Dynamic businesses must continually innovate to maintain competitiveness, evolve and grow. Valuable tax reliefs are available to support innovative activities, irrespective of your tax profile.
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Private client services
Our solutions include dealing with emigration and tax mitigation on the income and capital growth of overseas assets.
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Transfer pricing
The laws surrounding transfer pricing are becoming ever more complex, as tax affairs of multinational companies are facing scrutiny from media, regulators and the public
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Tax policy
Tax policies are constantly evolving and there are a number of complex changes on the horizon that could significantly affect your business.
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Outsourcing Changes to the Outsourcing legislation, specifically when offshoringSignificant changes to the dynamic of the financial services sector in recent years have shifted the paradigms in how we work. The increased digitisation of the workforce, changes in business models, globalisation, and remote working capabilities have led to a new approach to the delivery of services.
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Asset management Inflation and tax planningThe recent onset of rapid inflation is an unwelcome development that is having a widespread impact on US businesses and tax planning.
A business today is only as good as its data
It is extremely difficult, in a digital-enabled world, to keep track of all the data your organisation creates and gathers every day.
IBM calculates that nine-tenths of all the data in the world has appeared in the past two years alone. Others believe that we will live on a planet that contains 40 zettabytes of data by 2020 – which we estimate would be enough reading material to fill 50 billion human lifetimes.
So how do you find your crown jewels and your most sensitive data among those bytes? What constitutes high-, low- and medium-risk data? And against which cyber threats – from state-sponsored agents at one extreme to disaffected teenagers on the other, with organised criminals, disgruntled employees and ‘hacktivists’ in between – should you prioritise defence?
Confidentiality, integrity, availability
First of all, it is unrealistic to try to rank every spreadsheet, archived email or data file your organisation holds. And you cannot fully automate the process: there are tools that support data management and e-discovery, but human judgement is always required at some point. Ultimately, you need to ensure that your senior managers and risk personnel actively consider the different kinds of data they own – this way, they can isolate the assets that need to be looked at more closely.
“We’ve created questionnaires so our personnel can make a decision themselves,” says the VP of technology at a global bank. “It’s subjective. At the end of the day, it’s a person making a decision.”
In the following chapter, we recommend practical ways to ensure that your employees engage in this activity. But what should they be flagging?
Many organisations adopt a dynamic model that evaluates data according to confidentiality, integrity and availability (CIA), and can be tailored to reflect changes in the data’s importance or relevance over time.
“Board strategy papers are confidential until the time they go public and need to be protected,” says Manu Sharma of Grant Thornton UK, explaining the CIA approach. “For integrity, the information may be available to everyone but it has to be accurate – the share price from the New York Stock Exchange is a good example. Availability is whether people who need the data can get it and use it, like marketing lists.”
Thinking like a hacker
Another way to identify your most critical data-related risks is to think like a hacker and then consider the maximum damage they could cause.
“The current environment of information security is consistently evolving with new threats and vulnerabilities”, says Vishal Chawla of Grant Thornton US. “Leaders have to be willing to step into the shoes of cyber criminals, understand the threats these groups pose and come up with proactive strategies to protect their business’ interests.”
Which email threads could a former employee leak to embarrass their former managers? What intellectual property and trade secrets would be of interest to a foreign power? And how might a cyber criminal use your data to try to extort money from your business? These are just some of the questions you need to ask.