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Comment by wjnc | Hacker News Reader

It's a bit snarky, but tax payers around the world are thankful for having to pay additional taxes for your privilige. In the sense that the freedoms you enjoy financially in Switzerland have enabled massive tax-dodging worldwide.

Half a million worth of gold, no questions asked? Anti-terrorism-financing acts in Europe start with actions needed by banks and institutions at about 10-20k euro per transaction. Again, I would be among the first to doubt the use of these kinds of acts (does it stop _anything_?). But the tax dodging for one has been a real consequence of Swiss law. It's kind of where the libertarian in me meets the tax payer.

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I am sorry, but the modern global tax system is a mess and I don't want to support it in any way. I have to pay quite a lot of taxes and social payments here (contrary to a popular myth, Switzerland is quite tax-heavy for small businesses, and we have obligatory medical insurance, quite expensive), but at least, most of them were voted in directly on referendums, and a lot more were repelled by voters who are also taxpayers.

In most other countries, governments are free to issue new tax laws and amend old ones at their wish, without democratic validation. And the only feedback is the promise of candidates to fix things in the next 4 years, which they rarely fulfill.

> In most other countries, governments are free to issue new tax laws and amend old ones at their wish, without democratic validation. And the only feedback is the promise of candidates to fix things in the next 4 years, which they rarely fulfill.

In the US at least, the tax system is the way politicians can reward their contributors in the most straightforward manner. New, arcane deductions directed at individual companies or groups of companies make for a very complicated tax system. Politicians have no incentive to change it, and we have not elected a person who has a philosophical hatred of it.

I'm not sure you can say the decisions of one country "enable" crimes in another quite like that. The Swiss approach to tax and financial privacy isn't unreasonable, and if other countries require global cooperation to enforce their tax systems, then isn't that more of a design problem on their end?

Exactly. It's very similar to the encryption debate right now. But there should be a right to privacy regarding in which back I put my money after taxes were payed on it and the total amount of money is declared.

The main issue I always saw with the banking secrecy laws that we would store money for people like gaddafy and other rogues. That we should have stored much earlier by law.

This was solved years ago.

All banks, including Swiss banks, now require client identification first (no more "numbered accounts"), and they are disallowed to open accounts for some categories of people.

The Swiss approach was built on fees collected on money stolen by repressive governments like Nazi Germany, so it's not completely reasonable.

Also, for several reasons, it is no longer possible for a US person or organization to open a Swiss bank account. This is a pity, and quite inconvenient for US expats working here, but at least fine taxpayers of United States no longer have to worry about somebody dodging their taxation using Swiss banks, at least directly.

Yes, now tax avoiding Americans flee to South Dakota.

Exactly. And that's what this whole crackdown on Switzerland was all about. Not about stopping tax evasion or people hiding money, but about the US lobbyist profiting instead. At no point was it about justice.

Bingo! It is about keeping the money inside the country. It's not just the US. The German authorities even went so far as to offer and pay money to whistleblowers/thieves with CDs full of customer names. It looks like an economic war.

>but tax payers around the world are thankful for having to pay additional taxes for your privilige.

Those tax payers should be thanking their law makers who allow for entities within their jurisdiction to make use of laws elsewhere to avoid local laws.

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