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Business Risk Services
Our Business Risk Services team deliver practical and pragmatic solutions that support clients in growing and protecting the inherent value of their businesses.
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Corporate Finance and Deal Advisory
We offer a dedicated team of experienced individuals with a focus on successfully executing transactions for corporates and financial institutions. We offer an integrated approach, with our corporate finance specialists working seamlessly with tax and other specialists to ensure that every angle is covered.
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Economic Advisory
Our all-island Economics Advisory team combines expertise in economics and business with a wealth of experience across the public and private sectors.
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Forensic Accounting
We have a different way of doing business by delivering real insight through a combination of technical rigour, commercial experience and intuitive judgment. We take pride in delivering responsive and tailored solutions to all our clients, capitalising on the wealth of experience housed within our Belfast and wider Forensics team
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People and Change Consulting
The Grant Thornton People & Change Consulting practice works with clients on these issues as well as on all aspects of how they attract, retain, engage develop, deploy and lead their people.
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Restructuring
We work with a wide variety of clients and stakeholders such as high street banks, private equity funds, directors, government agencies and creditors to implement solutions which provide the best possible outcomes.
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Technology Consulting
Motivating and assisting our clients to pursue, maintain and secure the benefits of digital solutions is at the core of our Digital Transformation teams' agenda and goals. We work with business leaders to deliver efficient digital strategies and operating models that provide new or enhanced capabilities.
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Corporate and International Tax
Northern Ireland businesses face further challenges as they operate in the only part of the UK that has a land border with a country offering a lower tax rate.
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Employer Solutions
Our team specialises in remuneration and incentive planning and works closely with employers, shareholders and employees to ensure that business strategies are aligned and goals achieved in the most tax efficient, cost-effective manner.
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Entrepreneur and Private Client Taxes
Our team of experienced advisors are on hand to guide you through any decision or transaction ranging from the establishment of new business ventures, to realising value on exit, to succession planning and providing for loved ones.
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Global Mobility Services
Grant Thornton Ireland offer a different approach to managing global mobility. We have brought together specialists from our tax, global payroll, people and change and financial accounting teams across Ireland and Northern Ireland, while drawing on the knowledge and insights of our global network of over 143 offices of mobility professionals to provide you with a holistic approach to managing global mobility.
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Outsourced Payroll
Our outsourced service provides valued service to over 150 separate PAYE schemes. These ranging from 1 to 1000 employees, working for micro, SME and global employers. The service is supported by the integrated network of tax and global mobility teams and the wider Grant Thornton network delivering a seamless service. Experienced staff deliver a personal service built around your business needs.
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Tax Disputes and Investigations
Our Tax Disputes and Investigation team is made up of tax experts and former HMRC investigators who have years of experience in dealing with a variety of tax investigations. Our expertise and insight can guide you through all interactions, keeping your cost at a minimum while allowing you to continue with the day to day running of your business.
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VAT and Indirect Taxes
At Grant Thornton (NI) LLP, our team helps Northern Ireland businesses manage their UK and global indirect tax risks which, as transactional taxes, can quickly become big liabilities.
If you are one of the many people who has lost important work when their computer has frozen, or if your computer has, without any obvious reason, decided that the long document you have saved is no longer legible, it may surprise you to know that computers are, in fact, really bad at deleting information. Of course, if you are someone, like a fraudster who wants information to be deleted, this is a significant problem.
Modern computers are designed to store data as quickly and reliably as possible. They are built to optimise speed and save data rather inefficiently. Computers are designed to ensure data is preserved, they are not good at getting rid of it when it is not needed any more. The reasons are quite complex, but in essence, if you delete something on your computer, it isn’t really gone. It takes too much time for the computer to erase data, so it usually does not do it.
Cyber security examples
Computers can store a lot of information. Think of a big bookshop – say Waterstones in Belfast - the data storage capacity of any of the cash registers in those stores is without doubt a multiple of what can be written in the books on every shelf of the shop. If you were to save every word in every one of the nearly 8 million books in Trinity College Library as Microsoft Word files, they would fill around 12,000 Gigabytes of storage – 12 Terabytes. Samsung now sell a 15.5 terabyte hard drive which is about the size of a packet of cigarettes.
Modern computers have so much storage they really do not need to “recycle” space by deleting data. This may be a problem for many people. It represents a potential threat to peoples’ security and privacy. However, it allows forensic investigators, like me, to do our jobs.
Do you use your computer to browse the Web? Well it will usually preserve or “cache” the contents of the websites you visit, even if you use private browsing. You might delete this cache - private browsing does it automatically – but the data isn’t really gone. It is still on the disk and it can be brought back. If you did a Google search on your computer three years ago, the chances are it is still in there somewhere. How about your Word documents? Even if you write a letter, print it and shut the computer down without saving it, the text can still reside on your computer. Windows preserves it in case the computer crashes unexpectedly.
Do you have a backup of your iPhone on your computer or on your iCloud? You may have one and simply not know about it. That backup does not just contain your songs, it also holds SMS messages, emails, WhatsApp messages, photos and much more. The photo you took with your iPhone is not just a picture. It contains embedded information that can tell us when the photo was taken, the GPS location of where it was taken, what camera settings were used and much more. If you have used a USB stick on your computer recently, we can tell you the make model and serial number of the device, what files and folders were on it, when you used it and for how long.
Conclusion
As you might imagine, in an investigation all this material can be invaluable. IT forensics has become central to many criminal and civil investigations.
Therefore, while you may see this inability to delete data as a problem, for us it often provides the solution, enabling us to quickly identify the key facts and issues so clients can make important decisions.