The best professional advice is expensive, and you have to line up to get it. Hourly rates for highly-skilled professional accountants start at more than $300 an hour for a manager. For senior managers and partners, rates often exceed $600. Large, multinational companies are prepared to pay these rates because they know that the best advice is worth it, and they only pay for what they need.
These same multinationals ‘poach’ talent shamelessly from the ‘Big 4’ accounting firms to staff up their internal accounting and tax departments. So when the VP of tax for an international mining company calls up a tax partner at KPMG to discuss a tax issue, it’s more or less a discussion amongst equals.
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