Inside the Secretive World of Tax-Avoidance Experts (2015)
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
As soon as you're making more than a few hundred grand, or you become a junior on a ladder that looks like you'll get there, people will get a hold of you on the personal side.
On the corporate side, as soon as you touch offshore, one of the big 4 that you already work with will suggest some tax optimization as a matter of course.
It's always weird, requiring whole pages of A4 diagrams, and you'll never really understand why these constructions work.
Some of the ones I've been offered have been downright ridiculous. One involved setting myself up as an advisor on rap lyrics. Another required me to publish my own poetry. IMO the weird ones are the most aggressive, and it's always sold as a tax reduction, so I've never gone ahead with them. It just seems too good to be true, and someone's gotta pay for social expenses.
On the corporate side, it's a bit less clear cut. You have a duty to shareholders to more or less do what everyone else does. There's also the fact that some governments actively court firms to set up shop with a discount, which is a sort of mutually beneficial bargain.
while it's honorable to do so, one single person/entity isn't gonna change the tide. It's political will and changes to tax code that will make the difference - stop tax loop holes, and stop off-shore accounts that are untracable, etc.
In the end they simplified by simply cutting a deal with the Irish government. Of course they also went on enjoying all the facilities and infra provided by those who did pay their fair share of UK taxes. If any of the directors or their children had been taken ill or been in an accident, they surely would have expected the NHS to take care of them...
At the time, this was many years ago, I just saw all this as a fascinating technical challenge in database replication and distributed transactions; I’m obviously alot more woke now and wouldn’t get involved with it now.
Canadian mining companies do this with "hedging" contracts with their Swiss subsidiary that is basically a desk with 3 directors. Wait until you've hit a low in the market, then sign away the future growth to the subsidiary for "price-stability".
On the WAN side, I deliberately choose foreign AWS locations just to avoid the sales tax from domestic AWS sites...
I have been enormously buoyed up, though, by hearing from journalists and other pundits that ‘the rich won’t end up paying the 50 per cent income tax because their smart accountants will find a way around it’. When I put this to my own accountant, a senior member of a reputable London firm, he laughed and said: ‘Unless you want to go and live abroad for a very long time, or associate with some extremely unsavoury people, or invest in risky tax schemes, then for someone like you there is really nothing that can be done.’
Why do you think normal flat in Monaco costs up to 20+ million eur? It is a nice place, but not THAT nice (In MCO case you need only postbox which can be rented cheaply as many professional athletes do... unless you are French citizen, then you are screwed but can go elsewhere)
Hiding usually means just avoiding paying most of the income taxes (ie 5% instead of 40% or even much more in places like Scandinavia). In most countries, tax brackets for really high incomes are just ridiculously high, so everybody seeks to pay less taxes while staying legal. Taxes are a sinkhole from rich payer's perspective - you get back very little and you pay a lot.
It's like expecting common Joe not claiming some tax breaks he is entitled to. Why on earth would he not do it?
What exactly is untrue in my posts? Happy to learn more. My posts are quite generic for the topic, since we're on public internet forum but they come from my knowledge on this topic (which might be obviously invalid).
Not true for Monaco. They will go to such lengths as watching the CCTV footage that had been recorded of you in order to see if you are actually present in the country.
As I said if you are French citizen all this tax haven sugar isn't valid for you, Monaco banks will report you to French authorities, but for rest of the world it works (unless something dramatically changed in last year or two).
Not true for Switzerland: You have to be 6 months per year here to officially / taxwise "live here". Otherwise, you lose your permit. The same is true for Singapore, I believe.
If you come as an outsider to Suisse, private banks/tax companies will either refer you to their branch in place where this applies to you, or if your net worth is high enough (can't remember exact threshold but it should be in 5 mil CHF ballpark and above), you can literally buy citizenship and you're covered (ideally in Zug/Luzern as one can witness in local property market there but it always depends on the case).
Not every country has that luxury. And Norway didn't get there by seizing rich people companies to make them pay taxes.
The problem with picking one place your idea (sort-of) worked is you may miss the overall trend. Try picking all places the rich have had their companies seized and see how it plays out overall.
True, but more often historical behavior is the correct prediction looking forward. The future is not likely random in all behavior.
So your claim is only true when it's demonstrated that the historical averages are no longer valid ...
There are countries right now failing after seizing wealth from their citizens (Kim in NK, Marcos in Phillipines, Mugabe in Zimbabwe, Chavez in Venezuela, Pot in Cambodia, among others).
France recently tried it for a season, and enough rich and wealth left the country that they reversed it almost immediately.
Are there any that have recently prospered as a result of seizing the wealth of their rich?
All of those countries failed for different reasons and never solely because of "seizing wealth from their citizens", although that was always a component.
But the other thing to know about the tie-wearing professions is that although one guy says something, another may say something completely different.
Aside from not being alive, what prevents Terry Pratchett from moving to some island to write his next book?
The idea was for people to spend at least a couple of hours a week listening to and commenting on the music of P Diddy. I'm not sure how it connected legally on his side of the deal, but I also got this feeling that my musical input would not have a great impact on the artistic vision of Mr Diddy.
The poetry one was some guys who somehow found out that you could publish a book of crap poetry and write it off as a loss. Some spidery network of entities would in effect use this to reduce your taxes by a lot.
I know of people who've had the court rule against them, and they ended up in massive trouble.
This is a insidious myth that has never been uphed in court. It's just an excuse managers use.
Then don't use the word "duty", which indicates a legal obligation.
This is brazen corruption and everyone knows it. There has been focus on offshore havens for decades now with no resolution suggesting a lack of interest in fixing the loopholes.
It's like saying every employee can sell their services to a marketing firm which can then lease it out to employers. And the marketing firms can exist in low tax regions. If the law allows this it is not 'tax evasion', merely 'tax optimization'. The end result is is lower tax revenue but of course employees as a group do not have this kind of clout so won't happen. But let us not pretend we do not understand what is happening and muddy the waters in the face of brazen opportunism and corruption.
Speaking of a conflict of interest...
Not saying everyone here is bad at it; but it's an extremely social industry.
It's smart when I use it to save a few bucks and get ahead.
If I choose to pay 22% down instead of 20% so I can qualify to write off my interest payments, that's one thing. The schemes revolving around putting out shitty books of poetry or what not mentioned above are an entirely different beast.
My own way of looking at it is that it becomes more immoral the further out of your way you go and the further you stray from the original intent of the law
An entity with a gun says give me some of your money / labor or I will use violence or threat of violence to take it.
Individuals at the other end of the gun do what they can to reduce what they turn over to the entity with the gun.
An entity that you as an individual can participate in determining what goods and services are provided, at what cost.
This entity was around long before you.
In the US for example, the land we have here was taken by brute force / genocide, then a government was set up a couple hundred years ago (all of the founders have died and only about 5% of the population participated in the revolutionary war).
There aren’t any other real options of where to move where you won’t encounter such a violent entity claiming that if you set foot on “its land” you are giving consent.
You can’t give consent if there are no other real options or if you are being coerced.
What is a better argument is to say that this is where our species is from an evolutionary perspective and that the risk of violent attack by the state if you don’t comply outweigh the benefits. Also, the state provides some things you like (sort of like an alcoholic step father who abuses you but also occasionally buys GMO food and does a decent job of starting fights with the neighbors if they try to come into the house).
There is no morality involved, it’s simply a cost / benefit analysis.
Do you like spending half your tax dollars on military operations? Including buying bullets that go to kill innocent kids in regions that have resources deemed valueable to US capital?
The laws in the United States are not written in such a way that says “if you opt out of using roads or calling 9/11, you don’t pay taxes.”
It’s quite the opposite. You are threatend with violence to pay for those things and much more no matter your use pattern and quite often if you are poor your roads don’t get fixed and 9/11 doesn’t result in cops showing up let alone justice being served.
And simply because other outfits have set up similar rackets worldwide doesn’t make staying in the one you were born into a consentual agreement.
There are many, many places on Earth with so non-functional as to be non-existent governments, and zero taxation.
You just most likely will choose not to live in those places, because in many places you are subject to violence (as metered by law enforcement, made possible by taxation), have barely functioning infrastructure, electricity, fresh water, roads, Internet.
So what you'd really like is to have a don't tread on me style homestead with all the mod cons, and none of the drawbacks.
> Do you like spending half your tax dollars on military operations? Including buying bullets that go to kill innocent kids in regions that have resources deemed valueable to US capital?
That's a very black and white world view. I can appreciate the value of taxation and the benefits brought by it while still disliking/despising things like our military industrial complex and unnecessary "military actions". It's absurdly simplistic to (attempt to) reduce it to these two alternatives.
My general point is that there is nothing immoral about not paying taxes, it’s simply a cost / benefit if you’d like to avoid state violence in your direction.
However I think this isn’t a palatable truth and so people would rather justify their paying of taxes to make it easier.
Source: I used them to do this for a firm I was working for.
It's hardly secretive, many (academic) books have been written about it. You can find a million fiscal books and papers on fiscal literature and many top firms offer tax avoidance advisory services.
Tax evasion is different, it's entirely baded on being secretive due to its illegal nature. But that's not what the article is about.
The popularity of "centimillionaire" to mean $100 million is reflected in Google's top results.[1] Merriam-Webster dictionary, Wikipedia, and Forbes all mention centimillionaire as $100 million.
Likewise, "centipede" means a creature with ~100 feet (even though no species actually has exactly 100 feet).
Language usage is ultimately dictated by popularity instead of "correct" scientific prefix rules and it looks like "hectamillionaire" is not the widespread choice to label 10^8 dollars.[2]
[1] 18000 results for "centimillionaire": https://www.google.com/search?q=centimillionaire
[2] only 1880 results for "hectamillionaire": "https://www.google.com/search?q=hectamillionaire