THAT accountancy firm PriceWaterhouseCoopers (now trendily rebranded as PwC) helped clients to avoid tax “on an industrial scale” comes as no surprise.

As news, it ranks alongside ursine toiletry habits and the religious affiliation of Roman pontiffs.

Even so, the report of the public accounts committee detailing some of PwC’s dubious if not illegal practices is to be welcomed.

The tragedy is that little or nothing will now be done to smash the power of this and the other three accountancy racketeers — KPMG, Deloitte and Ernst & Young — who together audit 96 per cent of the FTSE top 250 companies in Britain.

This corporate Cosa Nostra takes around £25 billion of its £75bn global income in return for tax advice. That advice includes proposing tax avoidance schemes which — by PwC’s own admission — would probably be found illegal if challenged in court.

Those challenges rarely occur, obviously, because the British government and regulatory agencies stuffed full of Big Four ex-directors and future employees are knowingly complicit in this conspiracy to rob and cheat the public.

Many of the tax-dodging schemes are designed to make full use of Britain’s position as a paradise for corporate cheats, crooks and spivs. Here, almost anyone from anywhere in the world — as long as they are over the age of 16 — can become a nominee director or shareholder of an off-the-shelf “shell” company.

This or one of its affiliates or subsidiaries can be registered offshore in Monaco, Luxembourg or one of the many tax havens under British jurisdiction such as Jersey and the British Virgin Islands.

As a result, the identity of the company’s real owners is often hidden behind a curtain of commercial secrecy. Bogus transactions between different arms of what is essentially the same enterprise can ensure that profits are shifted to countries with low-tax regimes.

Assets values can be similarly manipulated. The failure of auditors to properly investigate and evaluate new and bogus financial assets and processes contributed directly to the 2007-8 crash in the developed capitalist world.

Then as now, the Big Four helped to concoct and sign off company accounts that were untrue and designed to maximise profits and bonuses and to rob public funds of revenue which could be invested in public services, wages, pensions and benefits.

As if that were not enough, Tory and Labour governments have hired these very same accountancy outfits to design and facilitate the rip-off privatisation and PFI ventures that afflict Britain’s gas, electricity, water, railway, prison, probation, postal and other industries and services today.

It is well past time for British governments to dispense with the self-enriching services of the Cosa Nostra and its specialist public-sector departments. Instead, our public sector should develop its own auditing and accountancy centres.

The statutory oligopoly of the Big Four should end and those companies subjected to the full force of laws designed to punish their racketeering.

Unfortunately, however, desperate to win the endorsement of the CBI, the Institute of Directors, corporate fat cats and the Tory press as “business-friendly,” the Labour Party leadership is unlikely to promote such an approach.

The Big Four dons will continue to sponsor stalls and meetings at Labour Party conferences and provide shadow cabinet members with staffers.

Yet the more Ed Miliband, Ed Balls, Chuka Umunna, Tristram Hunt and the like grovel to big business, the more they get kicked in the face.