The world's largest accounting firm, PricewaterhouseCoopers, agreed Thursday to make a "substantial payment" to the Internal Revenue Service for marketing corporate tax shelters and then failing to comply with rules requiring it to keep a list of such shelters and the clients who used them.
However, the firm neither admitted nor denied violating the regulations, which it promised to obey in the future.
PricewaterhouseCoopers is the second large promoter of tax shelters that the IRS has forced to disclose that it violated Treasury Department rules. Merrill Lynch announced last August that it paid what it called a substantial penalty.
PricewaterhouseCoopers, which did not disclose the amount of the penalty, made it clear that it intended to continue selling tax shelters and suggested that it had negotiated a significant concession from the IRS about future disclosures about its clients.
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