”Tax payers have lost up to €2 billion, that’s nearly €350,000 for every Danish man, woman and child.”
You sure about that math, cumex-files?
You sure about that math, cumex-files?
I have two takes on this: 1: The Danish tax authorities have been extremely careless in the administration of the rules. They didn't even check that the people owned the shares they claimed to own. Virtually all of it was approved by one employee with zero oversight. 2: Different international banks have either known what was happening, and willingly enabled it, or should have known. Money laundry rules oblige them to check when such giant sums flow in and out of such few accounts.
Yes. But people hates bureaucracy.
A common answer is'why do I need to present another document in the tax office?'
At least now Danish citizens have an answer. 'to avoid losing 1.7B'
bureaucracy is a remedy to a problem. It can be done right or wrong, but it's not bad by itself.
Of course the system was delayed.. by years... And there were fewer experienced employees available because the lay-off policy was to let people retire as normal, but just stop hiring.
When the system finally was released, the tax collection service was in dire straits. Layoffs had continued, experience was lost. Employees were doing the work of 3 people without really knowing how and having noone to ask for advice. To top it off, it was politically decided to decentralise the tax collection service and split the offices into many small units across the country. Causing even more people to quit.
This isn't the end though. The system was released all right, but it was quickly discovered that it was making illegal tax collections from citizens due to faulty property evaluation. Attempts were made to fix the system, but it was SCRAPPED AFTER TWO YEARS.
Now we are left with a broken tax collection agency which cannot perform its duties and lacks manpower to verify tax claims from companies knowingly exploiting the situation.
Then again, since it seems like most voters don't really give a damn, I guess it's politically expedient to just not care.
The entire idea was really not implemented well and now the tax agency needs like 4000 new people to replace the ones they didn’t want to lose. Lots of senior knowledge is gone and the entire agency is struggling doing its main tasks, resulting in hundreds of millions of missed taxes.
i dont think that's true
Here is a handy list:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales#Long_sca...
The UK is the only place in Europe where "billion" means 10^9; in Eastern European languages, there simply isn't an equivalent word, and everywhere else it means 10^12.
Like with metrication us Brits adopted it slowly so there were many years of seeing either usage. This wasn't confusing at all. :)
"miljoen" -> "miljard" -> "biljoen" -> "biljard" -> "triljoen"
^6 -> ^9 -> ^12 -> ^15 -> ^18
However, a lot of Afrikaans-speaking people use the de facto English convention. The newspapers usually get it right though, in contrast to this article.
The numbers are just too big for it to make sense. And I would not be surprised to see some of it coming down to the lack of math skills (or what you call it?) amongst journalists. How can anyone arrive at a result like that and not look one more time at their calculation?
Embarrassing really.
With all the fuzz about Sanjay (the alleged perpetrator) why hasn’t the danish police issued an international arrest order for him? Regardless if he is sitting in Dubai.
And what seems to be a common theme is that some of what has been going on is very hard to prosecute. The first wave of tricks seems to have been basically legal if I recall correctly. I haven't read the new slew of articles about the EU dimension on this yet though.
Plus the recent the story that Sanjay was put in jail due to a rubber check. Doesn’t sound like a guy who just got away with 1 B euros.
"In Denmark, journalists and the authorities are also investigating the cum-ex trades. Tax payers have lost up to €2 billion * , that’s nearly €350 for every Danish man, woman and child."
That's correct - mathwise.
Overstated a 1000 times, which suggests they are mistaking the new US-style billion of 1000 million for the old form of a billion (i.e. a million million).
edit: Then I got curious about what size a 'town' is, which led me to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settlement_hierarchy which gave me the word 'Ecumenopolis' for a planet-wide city.
The decimal separator in most european countries is the comma. $350,000 in Denmark equals to $350. If there is an error by a factor of x1000 I would assume that is a case of meaning lost in translation and not intentional. The use of a third decimal is uncommon and unfortunate in any case.