Hello everyone, welcome to the Tax By podcast series.

In this episode of the Tax By Podcast series, I'm happy to welcome two of my fellow colleagues

to talk about the challenges that businesses will have in the next six to six months to one year.

I'm Peter DeRae and I'm happy that you tune in for my podcast series.

Today I have with me Matthias Reynches.

Matthias is our consulting lead and he has a lot of interactions with businesses.

So I'm very interested to hear from Matthias what businesses are opposed to and face as challenges.

And in addition, I have Patrick Bonn with me.

Patrick is our managing partner for tax and legal services and I'm, yeah,

of me interested to hear what all of this can mean from a tax policy perspective.

So let's use the time we have.

Matthias, let me start with you. If we look at the world,

a lot is changing. You have a lot of interactions with businesses. So I'm interested to hear from you

in those interactions, what businesses find the most challenging developments for them?

Yeah.

Thank you, Peter.

If we look over the last few years, and it was also clear in the service we typically do,

one of the main topic was the challenge was the labor market, the War for Talent, as it's called, which has been already there for two, three years.

But especially now after the pandemic, we see that with a great resignation, especially in the U.S.,

but also in quite some European countries that we see an additional shortage in some areas, some industries and some specific

competencies. This was already there for two, three years, we say. On top of that, especially

since the beginning of this year, we added to that the scarcity of raw materials and also especially the energy costs arising since

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