Hacker News Reader

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?

View on HN

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

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com