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Comment by user5994461 | Hacker News Reader

I was scared for a minute. I thought this was about taxing consumer for accessing internet.

It's fine. It's about taxing giant corporations who are evading taxes.

They aren’t evading taxes. If they were evading they’d be prosecuted rather than a new tax being introduced. They’re avoiding. Like we all do with our ISAs and pensions.

If you misuse the terms it makes it harder for everyone to talk precisely about the issue.

>Like we all do with our ISAs and pensions

I think it's a bit disingenuous to suggest it's like that, because the average person is not worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

Sorry but you cannot in good faith compare the impact of tax avoidance by Amazon to an individual's pension.

The problem really is that the loopholes are inaccessible to regular small businesses. A lot of small companies _do_ pay a fair level of tax which makes it difficult to compete with a company that doew not.

It’s fine to debate morals.

But it’s important to make a distinction between legal and illegal.

You’re accusing them of having a different opinion on a moral isssue to you. That’s one thing. Accusing them of doing something illegal - that’s something else. And it’s now super clear that it’s legal, since we’ve decided we have to introduce a new tax to tax them.

My issue isn’t with the debate - it’s about being precise. If you say everyone’s evading then you ruin the power of really saying someone’s evading. You’re crying wolf.

I don't get it. On the one hand you say you just wanted to make clear the distinction between the two terms, on the other you claim when facebook and Amazon are avoiding taxes that's the same as when ordinary people try to save for retirement.

If you didn't want to be quoted on that you shouldn't have put that comparison in.

I don’t mind being quoted on anything.

It’s either legal or it isn’t. For one you can prosecute, the other you can only criticise. It doesn’t matter if it’s a single person or a massive company. Either we have made the solemn decision as a country that it is prohibited with the force of the state punishing you, or we haven’t. It’s a huge difference.

Think about it like this. The next time someone is really evading tax and you call them out on it people will think ‘oh well nothing we can do about that without new laws’ because you’ve conflated it with avoidance this time.

Look, we disagree on how tax avoidance should be dealt with on a personal and a corporate level and that‘s fine. But you‘re constantly conflating a valid point (which is a proper distinction between the two terms and which I agree with) with your opinion on the matter.

If one were less charitable you could call that a strawman.

It's not disingenuous, it's exactly the same motivation, just operating on a different scale.

Tax avoidance is not the same as pensions and ISAs.

Pensions and ISAs are tax planning. Using government mandated tax reliefs for their intended purpose.

Tax avoidance is using government mandated tax reliefs for unintended purposes.

Try not to misuse terms, it makes it hard to talk precisely about the issue.

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/tax-avoidance-an-introduction

Your link just confirms this is avoidance and not evasion.

They aren't necessarily evading taxes. When you participate in an ISA or pension program, you are using the tax code as intended. When a film production company decides to film in a given location due to favorable tax credits, that's using as intended. When multinationals set up shell companies in Ireland, the Caymans etc. whose sole purpose is redirecting revenue to avoid taxes it's arguable that in many cases this is evasion rather than avoidance. To the point that there are countries going after companies for back taxes related to some of these schemes now that its been made public and obvious that there were no 'real' business activities occurring in those locations other than minimizing taxes.

I believe the GP's incorrect 'by the letter' use of the term was intended to point out that this kind of avoidance is more like evasion in that it is against the spirit of the law.

> It's about taxing giant corporations who are evading taxes.

I wouldn't say "evading" unless what they are doing is illegal. If they are following the law, and the law allows what they're doing, then it's not tax evasion.

If you're not happy, then change the law to actually make it illegal, and then if those companies are still doing it then you can call it tax evasion.

Pointing out this distinction makes it sound like it's fine as long as it's legal. It's like when people say "It's not terrorism when a state does it because terrorism is defined as non-state political violence". It's technically true, but largely besides the point.

> It's like when people say "It's not terrorism when a state does it because terrorism is defined as non-state political violence". It's technically true

Except that it's not; usual definitions of terrorism don't exclude state action, and indeed state action is of particular concern with regard to terrorism, to the point of being frequently cited as justification for state-on-state warfare in recent decades.

There's a difference between killing people and (legally) avoiding tax. I care about innocent people dying, but I couldn't care less that greedy governments get less money (they don't deserve any money to be fair, considering how bad of a job they're doing).

Are you American because it sounds like you're an American and you hate your government?

There are countries where taxes actually pay things like healthcare, unemployment benefits or retirement and not financing wars in the middle east.

Are you European and send in additional money to your revenue collection agency?

No? You're avoiding taxes (or evading taxes) by choosing to pay the lowest legal amount you're obligated to. Therefore, you must be American. What a paradox!

I mean, the UK is literally changing the law to require them to do it because they felt that the companies weren't paying their fair share, so it seems like they felt that something wasn't quite right.

The fact that they changed the law rather than used the existing one makes it crystal clear that it was legal.

Not really. The GAAR makes many "technically legal" schemes illegal. But it requires expensive and long litigation by Hmrc to prove it.

Passing a new law short circuits the process.

And the GAAR also by their own admission covers rather less than you imply anyway which is why litigation is likely to be involved. The official guidance[1] specifically cites circumstances which are not (in HMRCs view) caught by it (eg nominating a different residence every month as your primary residence in order to benefit from additional reliefs which extend for longer than the month on multiple properties and effectively completely avoid capital gains tax) which you might have thought would be caught.

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/tax-avoidance-gene...

Not really. Often new laws are simply more specific, making prosecution easier.

For example a "noise nuisance" law covers a subset of offences that a "breech of the peace" law does. Other subsets could be covered by blasphemy laws, profanity laws, etc..

Along with being more specific it's a chance to declare a moral position and appear to be doing new things to protect citizens/subjects.

It'll likely trickle down to the consumer... the consumer will end up paying somehow.

This only happens in highly competitive markets like say, cotton t-shirts, gasoline, or wheat. It is not like Facebook is now going to have charge more for a social media account to stay afloat among a sea of other social media companies. No, Facebook (and Google, etc) will have to pay their corporate tax like they should. Although I think the new US corporate tax code is already going to prevent the current evasion schemes until, of course, new ones are invented.

That's a line pushed by large corporations to convince people that money saved through tax avoision is somehow benefiting the consumer. Companies should pay their fair share of tax.

Moreover, the argument makes little sense when dealing with companies like Google and Facebook. The average consumer isn't paying for access to Google Search, Gmail, or Facebook...

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