Germany’s dividend-stripping tax scandal
zeit.de
zeit.de
Yes, you may be able to justify this legally, but it is a morally highly questionable behaviour nonetheless.
I mean jesus, aren't many people on here some kind of intellectual elite? And these are the people that argue FOR the ones fucking over the general populace for their personal gain?
This kind of shit has to stop and we should be the people stepping in for the little man. Unless of course you dream of one day profitting from the same anti-social tax-evasion bullshit.
Same goes for taxation itself. Many in this thread will argue that it cannot be theft since it is legal, which is absurd.
You seem to assume that everybody here has (or should have) more sympathy for 'general populace' or 'little man' than the other side. Why? Have you spend considerable time of your life with 'general populace' and 'little men' at all?
Intellectual elite does not have relationship to morals - those properties are quite independent. Moreover, people who consider themselves intellectual elite tend to look down on general populace.
One thing that deeply impressed me when reading Robert van Gulik's "Judge Dee mysteries" was that the judges were required to study (and write!) a lot of poetry and literature as well, which IMO increases their emotional intelligence and make them more sympathetic with the populace they are governing and increase their sense of justice without going Hitler-mode.
(The irony of the fact that he was describing a society that didn't have a problem treating women as sub-humans doesn't escape me, of course. I'd argue that outside of that however, the system described by Robert van Gulik had advantages.)
What they did is pseudo-trade around stuff and gave multiple persons checks with tax that was never paid so people could get back tax that they never paid.
There is no moral wiggle-room if you try to get tax returns on tax you didn't pay. If you don't agree, pay me back the money I never gave you. Doesn't make sense at all.
I think much of the problem is due to tax system complexity. Not sure about Germany, but in the US we have a horribly complicated mess. Thus the spirit and the letter of the law are not the same (at least it is not clear if they are the same).
I think the main argument that I kind of buy is that while the companies described do not break the letter of the tax law, the break the spirit of it. I would agree if the rules were simple and well understood. As it is, what if I got audited by the IRS. If they find me missing a receipt (say, a paper copy got destroyed) my arguments that I am fulfilling the spirit of the law by paying my share of taxes would fall on deaf ears (I think). Broke the letter of the law -- this is your fine. And this approach encourages reciprocity. My 2c.
Vague laws are written and then interpreted by judges and these go on to set precedent. Suddenly you find yourself in the situation that in order to make sure you're not breaking any laws, it's a full-time job.
If ignorance of the law is no excuse, and it's practically impossible to know all the law....
That's sadly very true and assumes guilt by default which is a very broken state of affairs. It's roughly the same as with mass surveillance -- if the government has enough data on you, they will find something to convict you of.
So yes, this behaviour should absolutely be labelled illegal and persecuted. Your comment didn't contribute much to the discussion save for reinforcing the original objection of your parent commenter -- "who cares if it's technically legal when it's very clearly immoral and destructive for the society at large".
I mean, apparently, it wasn't so bad. It only took them 20 years to make that behavior illegal. They would certainly have been faster if it were bad. /sarcasm
People will always try to game the system. But in this case, the politicians failed to act properly after it was obvious that it didn't work out as intended.
For the second case, I'd call that theft, too. But theft that involves corrupt lawmakers. When communists confiscate people property, it is theft, no matter what the communists put in their law.
A Financial regulator/watchdog is to blame. And of course, Quelle Suprise, lots of countries let the finance sector regulate themselves.
Which is silly, because there are no ethics involved with some of these people. Just profits, at any cost.
And then -- "we're too busy to know this stuff". In an ideal world such a politician would fly far away from office immediately, and all the people who benefitted from that would have to return the gained money from the loopholes, or live in cozy conditions in the jail. One can dream, right?
So, what are the politicians supposed to know? How to bullshit the general populace on TV?
Instead of debating based on facts and laws (codified morale and ethics) you expect the "intellectual elite" to debate mob style based on gut feelings?
> This kind of shit has to stop
Personally I agree. But some context:
* Germany holds federal elections later this year.
* The business practices where not secret. Not at all. They have been debated publicly for years.
* The business practices have been allowed to go on by the very same who now fake outrage.
* All but the most incompetent players will provide a "Rechtsgutachten" and thus walk free. A "Rechtsgutachten" in German law is basically the testimony of an expert witness [1] that you get before doing something. If later a judge deems your doing wrong, you pull that out and can rightfully claim that someone from the government who is supposed to know more than you told you "it's ok".
[1] in this case someone with actual judicial/legal powers like a judge or a high ranking IRS official
Yes, I absolutely expect that. We're not only intellect, we have feelings as well. If we only operated on intellect, one could argue that the black people would forever retain status of sub-humans (which was never true!) and slavery would be perfectly fine since it actually made sense economically from the point of view of the slave owners. At some point somebody emotionally yelled "ENOUGH IS ENOUGH, WE HAVE RIGHTS!" and things picked up from there. There were no strict rules of the kind you ask for when it came to rebelling against such a rigid status quo. Does that mean it shouldn't have ever happened?
What are you arguing in favor of? Throw away all gut feelings and emotions out of all politics and lawsuits? I am very sure history knows cases when a judge felt sympathy for a disadvantaged person even though technically the law was on the side of a more powerful person/organization. Then that judge followed a moral code and made an "illogical" decision.
"Justice" isn't well-defined and won't ever be and I think it's time to accept that this is okay.
Rules can be improved and made clearer with time but there's always a case where the gut feelings are a necessary part of the whole picture. Even if a certain set of morals are written down, that set won't ever be precise.
Like damn, sometimes I feel people in HN want to get rid of their bodies and emotions and just become a soulless AI living on a server in a low-orbit. Those kinds of people I won't ever trust with justice though.
There are desks at banks whose entire reason for existence it tax arbitrage. It's not really a great use of people's education and time, but it's real and it's legal. I don't know the specifics of how it's done, but I do know these desks exist.
There was another case in Denmark where the tax department basically neglected to check that the claimants actually owned the shares and just sent them a huge amount of withheld dividend tax.
The underlying issue is that the rules can be gamed, but only by entities who can pay for the professionals who understand them. There's gotta be a smarter way to arrange the tax system.
€3,100,000,000 != 31.8 billion
> Total amount lost by the state due to the tricks: at least €3,100,000,000 (31.8 billion)
So which is it? 3.1 billion or 31.8 billion? It's not a minor difference!
Also, does anyone else have extreme difficulty reading text while an animated gif taking up 1/4th of the screen constantly loops? I usually scroll until the gif is off-screen so that I can continue reading. In this case it's impossible because there are multiple gifs per page so I can't scroll in any direction.
If we start with these sorts of calculations, why not set the tax rate to 100%? Apparently the taxed populace doesn't ever do anything worthwhile with their money.
link: http://www.money.pl/gospodarka/raporty/artykul/skok;na;pieni...
In short: it was an unpopular but wise decision by the former Polish gov to stop this scam. I believe that the current government is going further into that direction. Also a good move.
The government introduced this type of investing in Poland in the reform in 1999 and in 2014 just didn't buy back obligations which were bought using peoples money.
You can have as many ethical systems as you want and call it "evil" or not depending on your opinion. But you don't have multiple law systems (in a single country) and call it "theft" or "legal loophole" depending on what mood you're on. It's either one or another.
In my absolute layman's opinion cum-cum trickery might have been legal unless forbidden, but cum-ex sounds more like fraud than exploiting loopholes - and the state has sued all the people and organisations involved starting from 2014 - looking for tax evasion and fraud convictions...
ZEIT: "The Multibillion Euro Theft". To call it theft then, is a bit ridiculous. It was a loophole. There are loopholes everywhere. If lawmakers would make proper laws (isn't that part of their responsibility?), and took sufficient time to think them through, a lot less loopholes would exist. Unless they're put there by design, of course.
This loophole seemingly allows you to take back more than you paid in the first place. This is theft.
That is what the article is about, claiming the same tax rebate for the legal fiction that there are 2 simultaneous owners of a stock due to a short sale.
If you allow that, why not let me sell your short sale short, and then sell that short so that there are 8,16, or 32Billion rebates to be had.
Legal fiction is the key... and yes, they let lobbyists rewrite the law promising they wouldn't exploit the new one, but they were caught doing it again (on the excluded foreign accounts).
If a child in a nursery grabs away another child's juice box for themselves, they haven't broken any law, but it's still theft. If an autocratic government passes a law allowing it to seize the assets of a minority group, it's still theft. If a bank exploits legal loopholes to take billions of taxpayer's money, it's theft, regardless of whether it's legal.
> This loophole seemingly allows you to take back more than you paid in the first place.
To this?
> This is theft.
Because by itself, this logic would seem to include all welfare recipients - they also take more than they pay. You probably didn't mean to call them theives though; so, you probably have more precise criteria to calling someone a thief than just "he takes back more than he pays".
A lot of people are confusing what reality is with how we want it to be.
It just doesn't exist "out there"
If you want to not pay taxes you either must take the punishment, fight to become the defining power of said society or move to somewhere you don't have to pay taxes.
If you are the strongest you can stand for yourself but there is no natural law that prevents someone from making you a slave of them.
Since We live in a western democratic civilization, and there are laws against that very thing, I'm not sure what you are trying to say.
I was responding to a claim that tax is theft if theft is defined by involuntarily giving something up.
Theft is not taking involuntarily. Theft is taking illegally which is an important distinction to make. I take your watch. I want to keep it. It's taken from me against my will. That's certainly not theft.
With slavery, the slaves don't get a voice. They can't choose to not be slaves. With taxation in a democracy you can choose to run for office and change the laws yourself if you really wanted. Or you can just work to get someone else who better represents your views elected.
With racial segregation, again, the victims don't get a voice. They are prevented from voting, they are intimidated and oppressed.
You are not being oppressed because we've chosen to pay taxes to fix the roads and take care of the elderly.
That's your opinion. Many people disagree that minimizing taxes through tricks and borderline "optimization" is moral (see: tax avoidance [0]).
Not everybody shares the same moral compass, as it is linked to many factors, including your political beliefs, country, education, etc.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_avoidance#Public_opinion
> Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them.