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Comment by yann63 | Hacker News Reader

Couldn't we just ban tax evasion? What makes it so hard? (honest question)

A recent European study has shown that the more company win money, the less they pay in taxes (in percentage).

Is it because of bad laws? Corrupt politicians? Something else?

As others have said, it isn't evasion but avoidance. The issue is that there a lot of ways to put the money on the books wherever you want it. Let's say you want to sell mobile phones. You could create one company in France that builds, buys and sells phones. In this case it becomes pretty clear it is a French company and all the money will be taxed in France. But let's say you have that same company and split it up into three companies. You put your corporate company A in Ireland. That company A owns a company B in India that makes the phones. The corporate company A also owns a company C in France that only sells phones. Company A can decide which company is profitable by deciding who much B charges C for the phones they make. Company A can also charge B and C consulting fees for helping to run their businesses. Basically A can decide which of the three companies is profitable and make the others even "lose" money as far as the accounting goes. It is now very unclear if this is a French company and at who's tax laws the money should be assessed. Obviously, the company A can make this much more complicated. It is also really hard to know which of these organizational things are about tax avoidance and what is about efficiency of manufacturing and running a business.

I was listening to Presidential candidate Andrew Yang in his podcast with Joe Rogan. His plans, since there's a lot of avoidance, is to attempt a different route called a "value added" tax where there's a tax for trucking mileage and online transactions. He mentioned other countries to both of these, but don't remember which he mentioned off the top of my head.

Here's the podcast for those interested, there's a lot of other interesting discussions here that are related to this topic, such as automation and basic income. https://youtu.be/cTsEzmFamZ8?t=843

A VAT tax makes a lot of sense. It would reduce the incentive for large market quasi-monopoly seeking companies to optimize for no profits to avoid taxes. The current dynamic is- why pay taxes when you can spend it to expand your market share?

VAT taxes are extraordinarily regressive. Next to lowering taxes on the rich, it's among the worst possible options.

Increasing the income tax and taxing capital gains at regular income rates, along with bolstering estate taxes on the rich, are the ideal near-term solutions to the US budget problem. The US still has a lot of slack taxing capacity on the wealthy. That should be maxed out long before we look at a VAT.

Regressive taxes can be fine, as long as you balance them with transfer payments so that the poor don't end up paying more.

They might even make the economy more efficient. I'll leave that argument to the economists, though.

I think you also need to have tax breaks on certain things, for instance groceries and non-luxury clothing. Many high-tax, high-CoL states here in the US are like this, so that poorer people don't pay so much for essentials.

Can you expand on why you think it's regressive?

> That should be maxed out long before we look at a VAT.

This is relative. The US government sucks at being efficient.

Not the person you asked, but as I understand it, poor people spend a higher percentage of their income on goods and services (because they have less left over after paying for basic necessities). So a higher percentage of their income is lost on VAT than a richer person. This makes it a much less progressive taxation method than e.g. Income tax.

What if they're only imposed on corporations?

VAT in European countries is often the highest or the second highest revenue stream. The downside is that it's usually a flat tax and it disproportionately affects poor people.

Except Digital sales take place in no-man's land, and are hard to tax. A federal tax hits Amazon, but would it hit Alibaba? The specifics are what make these ideas so difficult.

I think that's pretty simple. If the purchaser in this country, tax them for that sale.

Suddenly it strikes me that one fix might be eliminating international subsidiaries. It's possible it would be hard to enforce in practice, but the crux of the problem is the absence of a competitive relationship & autonomy between these supposedly independent companies.

The obvious solution is to eliminate corporation tax and shift it to areas that are harder to avoid such as dividends, capital gains and land value.

Sounds very reasonable. I'm sure there's a catch, but I don't see where it is.

Taxing a business looks like a weird thing to do: a business can only spend money on business-related stuff pretty much by definition.

In order for money to be spent on non-busines things, it should be paid out as a salary, dividends or something like that which we know how to tax pretty well.

I'm certainly missing something, but what?

Not an economist so I don't know the official reason. But a corporation can theoretically accumulate profits indefinitely without making a payout, while governments need stable yearly revenue.

Maybe more material from a public policy point of view is that we like to tax different things at different rates, to favor or disfavor spending on various things. Hard to tax a salary based on what the employer spent their money on.

A corporation could accumulate although I expect shareholders would stop that fairly quickly.

You could still implement Pigovian taxes such as fuel or alcohol duties.

There's many valid reasons for accumulating profits, such as planning buyouts or expansions. That being said, sometimes it can be done for reasons such as waiting for a preferable tax regime. Due to that, some countries have a separate accumulated earnings tax that is similar to individual wealth taxes to disincentivize accumulating without a business purpose.

Or stop taxing "profits" but tax every transaction on its total amount, that would also end a lot of "tax niches"

We already have VAT or sales tax.

> Or stop taxing "profits"

By "profits" I meant to stop business being able to claim expenses and reduce the tax. We could replace complex taxation scheme only-on-positive-profit with a simple 1% (for example) tax on all transfers, on the total amount, no matter what is the purpose of the money transfer

That incentivizes the creation of vertically-integrated conglomerates over small companies, in order to reduce the number of transactions; is that what you want to foster?

You need to take into account all the simplification it would imply in tax collection / paperwork / regulations etc. The cost of our current ways of taxing wealth and profits is huge

In the US, the IRS collected $3.33 trillion in revenue in 2018, with a total budget of 11.5 billion (2017). Thats 0.3453%, or 35c per $100 of tax revenue. Fairly minor in the scheme of things.

Monetary costs are a small subset of general costs (and the cheapest ones, easier to know and aggregate).

that's only one side of the ledger (collection). Now calculate the costs to the taxpayers (people and corps).

The trouble with that is it will penalise low margin businesses, Apple could easily afford it on their 30% margin but a budget PC maker with a 3% margin would struggle.

Small businesses are already penalized by our current laws and ways of taxing profits. I believe the alternative I am proposing (that will never come to reality) is easier for everyone

Sure, it's easier, but it also means you'll just have a bunch of giant vertically-integrated monopolies. Easier, sure, but I don't see how that's better.

It's better because it's cheaper for everyone to do business. More competition, everything gets cheaper.

You mean like VAT/GST.

Not like GST : it would be on all transactions in the legal currency, including B2B. There wouldn't be an artificial difference between "businesses" and "customers"

Not like VAT : VAT is way more complex and expenses are deducted at each step

So cheaper for large integrated companies? Sounds like it'd really hurt competitors starting up.

It would kill any business with a long supply chain, the only manufacturers left would be the ones where ore arrives at one end of the factory and finished goods come out of the other end.

It would be cheaper for everyone because of tax simplifications. Current system is already unfair to a lot of group of people, including small businesses. And large company also have money transfers so I am not sure to understand the example unless we go into the specifics a little bit more

How does that help France? Those taxes would still be paid in Ireland.

> one fix might be eliminating international subsidiaries

I believe that means "no multinational companies" - one could certainly argue for that, but it's a much bigger discussion. And I think you would have to end up forbidding citizens (residents? how does it work when you move countries?) of country A owning shares of company in country B if you really wanted that to work.

It's tax avoidance because we call it that, so why don't we start by not saying tax avoidance anymore and call it tax evasion like it literally is when a company invests massively in accounting to abscond with their taxes.

There's a big difference between the two. Tax evasion is breaking the law to pay less tax. Tax avoidance is working within the confines of the law to pay less tax.

Putting money in a retirement account is a form of tax avoidance, but it was provided and is working as intended. The issue is not the definition, it's that legal loopholes allows unintended tax avoidance. The way to correct it would therefore be to close the loopholes, and many of the remaining loopholes span international borders and are tough to close without negative unintended consequences.

The difference between avoidance and evasion is only relevant if you have tax law interpreted to the letter only.

Tax law should be interpreted by the lawmakers intention and companies should be ready to be fined or uptaxed if authorities find they pay less taxes than is reasonable given global profits and relative turnover within their jurisdiction.

Constructs such as paying “royalties” to parent companies, or taking very expensive internal loans to effectively move all profits to tax havens (using Dutch BV’s etc) should simply be outlawed. Countries simply shouldn’t recognize these as acceptable practices.

This obviously leads to what companies like to call a “hostile business climate” - so a country will need to be pretty attractive in other aspects to not scare off international business.

That would be a nightmare.

First, tax laws don't have clear intentions to begin with -- if a tax law passes with 51 out of 100 votes in the legislature, all 51 representatives could be supporting the "letter" of the law for 51 different actual intentions, many of which might not be noble in the first place (e.g. give a particular local factory a tax break to win more votes next election).

Second, because of this, "intention" would be left open to completely different interpretation by different judges and result in completely arbitrary, non-predictable outcomes in different cases, which would be a nightmare for companies to even attempt to comply with. There's a reason that laws are interpreted by their letter -- it's the only fair way to do it.

Third, the tax laws are passed by different countries and are not harmonized, so even if they had clear intentions, their intentions can completely conflict, and there's no reason why they should be harmonized -- different countries are allowed to have legitimately different philosophies on taxation, there's no "right" answer.

The things you say should "simply be outlawed" -- how? How are you going to determine which internal loan is merely "expensive" (OK) versus "very expensive" (not OK)? How are you going to differentiate between legitimate payments and the "royalties" you put in quotes that you call a construct?

> The things you say should "simply be outlawed" -- how? How are you going to determine which internal loan is "expensive" versus "very expensive"? How are you going to differentiate between legitimate payments and the "royalties" you put in quotes that you call a construct?

Example for interest rates: Credit risk and intrabank/central bank rates are considered by courts when judging whether a rate is “too high”.

Swedish tax authority guidelines from past cases

https://www4.skatteverket.se/rattsligvagledning/edition/2019...

Summary - interest rates should be based on market conditions and credit risk

- internal loans should not use significantly higher (or lower) than loans between independent parties.

So: the authority already makes a judgment of e.g credit risk. If the tax authority thinks the interest rate was too high, they will say what would have been reasonable - and the company will be taxed for the increased profit as a result of the lower interest rate.

I don’t see anything controversial about this and I assume this is how tax law is interpreted and enforced globally.

It should be noted that such cases are usually lost by the authority - that is, the courts do usually not find the tax authority could prove that the interest rate wasn’t a normal rate based on market rates and risk. I don’t think that’s a problem, but I think it’s important that this is how it works.

It's more complicated than that.

A few percent here or there is all it takes to make a company unprofitable. Most companies don't have huge margins even when they're not trying to reduce them on purpose. You don't need the rate to be higher by a lot, only a little.

And then there is the principal. If you want profits in a jurisdiction, the entity there can get cash by e.g. selling its shares to the parent, which it then has without having to pay interest on. If you don't want profits there, the parent pays nothing (or some nominal amount) for shares and the subsidiary borrows all of its capital, which it then has to pay interest on at prevailing rates which may by itself exceed its profits indefinitely.

And loans are far from the only opportunity for this sort of thing. Pay slightly more for COGS to a sister company and you make significantly less profit, because a small percentage of gross is a large percentage of net.

One percent here, two percent there and soon a 10% margin is -0.1%.

What causes this is trying to tax something (profit) which is independent of any specific activity or jurisdiction. If a company makes phones and sells them, there is no principled reason why a certain percentage of the profit should go to the place where the phone is manufactured vs. designed vs. sold vs. the residence of the investor(s). If your jurisdiction is the one where they're sold but not manufactured or designed etc. and you want to tax that, the bleeding obvious way to do it is with VAT or some similar product/service tax. Trying to contort income tax into that shape is silly and just provides more opportunities for lawyers and accountants to find new loopholes.

Yours is a very well reasoned argument.

We already have rules requiring that! So what's the content of your proposal?

My parent post was a description of how we already have “arbitrary judgement” - so my previous suggestions to e.g tax income based on share of revenue in a jurisdiction would be arbitrary but no more arbitrary than what we already have.

The usual solution is a "General anti-avoidance rule" (GAAR). This doesn't get into the intent of the tax law, only into the intent of the business action. If there would be a simpler, more natural, and otherwise cheaper way to do it, but it's been done a particular way to avoid tax, then it's unlawful.

This seems kind of like the "What is / isn't gerrymandering?" problem.

I am not an accountant, but couldn't most corporate structures be reimagined by taxing authorities as an idealized "single company"?

Then calculate the difference between taxes that would be owed by that company vs the actual structure?

If there's a statistically significant discrepancy, require the company to provide a rationale. Or pay some penalty.

I wonder how well that would work for intangibles like branding, patents, or copyright - all three are artificial and can essentially be charged for arbitrarily and the company value is what provides their worth.

I suspect it would be easier to have a subsidiary rate rule - they may charge percentage either net or gross but not expenses for any IP including required external salaries but even that probably has loopholes or inviabilities.

I don't think it is unheard of to have a judge interpret the intention of a law.

I disagree. Tax laws should be simple and explicit. The people in charge change over time. I don't trust that the people later will interpret the laws the same way as the people today, or that either will interpret the laws the same way they were intended, or that the group of people that wrote the laws all had the same intent.

Crimes much more serious than tax evasion have grey areas specifically to create room for judicial discretion. Words like “with malice aforethought” or “forcibly” are used in statutes because the law can’t preconceive of every possible way to commit a murder or rape.

And crimes much less serious, too. There's a LOT of US laws that are intentionally vague and/or grant far too much leeway for the justice system. The grants extraordinary power because of edge cases they want the law to be able to handle ("think of the children"). Yet time and time again, it's the average Joe that has the law abused against him. These overly vague laws are used incorrectly, and yet we keep creating them because we don't learn that the people in power cannot be trusted; most of them are good, but it only takes one bad apple to ruin the lives of many people.

> I disagree. Tax laws should be simple and explicit. The people in charge change over time. I don't trust that the people later will interpret the laws the same way as the people today [...]

You can say the same about law in general, yet law isn't "simple and explicit". It is very complex, hard to grok, therefore only a small amount of people are able to, leading to expensive lawyers and a law system which the poor cannot afford (ie. class justice).

Yes, ideally I also want laws to be simple and explicit. I'd even argue that worked quite well before globalization. Now it doesn't anymore. We need to adapt.

It's unreasonable to expect judges to divine lawmakers' intent on subtle issues of tax policy. If lawmakers want a tax to work a certain way then they need to just write that down so that it's clear to everyone.

You liter ally put it in a preamble.

Like, if you say "this tax break is intended solely for people who sell second hand cars" then you don't have to spend 100 pages exactly specifying every nuance to 100% prevent people not selling second hand cars from taking advantage of it.

Ots called principles based tax code and it works.

I was initially high sceptical of the idea but, based on outcomes, it is a vastly superior system to rules based tax codes. It makes it far simpler and clearer to everyone.

If it is that simple, you can add a clause to the law that makes selling second hand cars a requirement.

Then you have to clarify how much of your expanses are eligable. Just those directly involved in the sale? Upkeep of your main facility? Upkeep of your satalite corporate offices? Your finance division?

What if you sell new and used cars? What if you are actually a battery manufacturer that makes and sells cars and also buys back and resales used cars?

What if you are a software engineer who sells your current car every 6 months?

But what if the people 'engaged' in the selling of the cars are only tenuously engaged in the activity and are simply trying to game the law and rack up paper losses?

All the car buying and selling is racked up by agents working on their behalf and they pay absolutely no heed to buying a selling cars?

http://www.mynewsdesk.com/uk/hm-revenue-customs-hmrc/pressre...

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/feb/21/chris-moyles-u...

Enforcement of tax law is based on the spirit of the law, not just the text. Things which are legal for a few years could become illegal the best without any change in the tax laws themselves, though this is only a real risk if you structure your activities within the letter of the law but not the intent of the law.

(I'm a tax lawyer.)

tax evasion is illegal; tax minimization is lowering your tax burden using existing laws and is not illegal.

Governments should reduce the number of unintentional loopholes but (a) it's far easier to pass new laws than amend old ones, (b) if you change a law that an existing big domestic firm or voting block is exploiting they will let you know at the polls; with a new law you can sell it as "balanced fiscal justice - righting a great wrong by making big foreign multinationals pay their fair share!"

I'm definitely not against tax reform, my big concern is the common approach of new taxes as political theater without any honest attempt at simplification, broad application or coordination with other jurisdictions. All this tax is doing is targeting a small, low-vote target that will figure out a complicated way to shift taxable revenue into a different jurisdiction, perpetuating the exact problem it supposedly addresses.

> Governments should reduce the number of unintentional loopholes

They are intentional. Source: tax lawyer friends.

> without any honest attempt at simplification, broad application or coordination with other jurisdictions.

The problem with that is that the other jurisdictions have no interest in closing tax loopholes. The irish bend over backwards to let Apples unique sheme qualify as double irish (their tax office had to issue several private rulings) and they had no interest in getting rid of the double irish itself either. For a tax haven making even a cent in taxes they wouldn't have otherwise gotten while costing a different country a million is a win.

The double Irish was gotten rid of in 2015 https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/double-irish-with-a-dut...

You can see the impact of that crackdown in their tax receipts and tax to GDP ratio. Government revenue from Double Irish tax arrangements was fully 5% of their GDP.

https://data.oecd.org/tax/tax-revenue.htm

For every company already using it "will be", in 2020. Enough time to migrate to the next trick.

> The problem with that is that the other jurisdictions have no interest in closing tax loopholes.

A lot of people see that as a feature. "Competitive governance" may be the biggest reason the world works as well as it does.

I could live in a world with a little less tax avoidance by the rich. So in this case I don't see the upside to a country violating long standing trade deals to make a little more on the side.

Banning tax evasion is easy. Just get rid of corporate income taxes and replace it with a sales tax. It's not like corporations pay taxes anyways; their customers do as tax is built into the cost of products.

I see a couple of issues with this solution:

1) Companies would not pay most of their taxes where they put the greatest strain in public infrastructure.

2) Moderate differences in VAT rates would create enormous price differnces, which would invite smuggling.

3) The incentive for rich people to move to low tax destinations would be even greater than it already is.

I won't deny that the solution has upsides as well though.

Companies don’t put strain in public infrastructure. They’re legal abstractions. People and their activities (employees, shipping, factories) put strain on the public infrastructure, and they can be taxed (income, real estate, and pollution taxes) at that point.

The issue is that when Google shows ads to someone in the UK to monetize a search service used by the UK person, Google uses almost no UK resources.

Exactly. What a lot of governments seem to want is some form of tax on foreign companies for the privilege of gaining access to their local population/market. For physical goods we call that an import duty.

They do indeed want that, but what is it that has changed recently that makes this so much more urgent? People claim that digitisation has changed the equation, but I don't understand why. Google is for the most part a regular US exporter.

It appears to me that the only thing that has changed is that the US has left everyone else in the dust, which causes envy.

What's changed is that the "foreign competition" are winning to the point that "local businesses" are closing. Exactly the same thing that drives calls for protectionism in physical goods industries.

Governments need more tax revenue. Almost every country with social programs is on a timer to figure out ways to raise tax revenue to pay for those programs. Almost every developed country has a fiscal gap.

I get why everyone (me included) wants money. But if every government comes up with its own inconsistent ad hoc scheme to tax foreign corporations then they will unleash the mother of all trade wars.

>The issue is that when Google shows ads to someone in the UK to monetize a search service used by the UK person, Google uses almost no UK resources.

Why is that an argument against moving from corporation tax to VAT though? I don't think it would change much in terms of the UK's (in)ability to tax Google.

>3) The incentive for rich people to move to low tax destinations would be even greater than it already is.

I don't know why people keep harping on this, it simply isn't true at all. If it were, all the rich people would be living in Somalia right now, and they aren't, they're living in high-tax, high-CoL areas.

Very few rich people live in a way that allows them to live anywhere on the planet. Most "rich" people in the US are still working, and have to live someplace that allows them to continue to work. Some millionaire running a business in Silicon Valley can't just relocate to rural Alabama and expect to continue that.

You're conflating all sorts of rich people into a single type and then use that as the universal example. Warren Buffet lives in Nebraska and operates his conglomerate just fine from there. This he was doing before the internet age, something that now allows for even greater freedom of moving and operating from distant places.

Warren Buffet is one of the richest people in the world, on par with Bill Gates. He isn't representative of "rich people", which in America can be said to be 1% of the population (or several million people).

Nebraska isn't exactly third-world either.

Yup. Tax things which really exist within a country, not accounting fictions (like precisely which arm of a multinational made how much profit).

Although I'd also like everyone to stop using the term "income tax" for this. It's a tax on corporate profits, and has nothing at all to do with personal income tax, a tax on wages.

... and you ban cash and all ad hoc barter networks. Good luck.

Make cash / ad hoc tax free. Want to avoid tax? Buy used!

not really. unlike people, corps pay taxes on profit, not revenue.

and the issue isn’t evasion. it’s avoidance. which allowance for is intentional by governments for good and bad reasons.

Not really, people also pay tax on profit not revenue. Expenses related to business activity can generally be deducted in most places no matter whether you are incorporated or not. It's the basis on which business expenses you claim back from your employer are not taxed and the way unincorporated sole traders and bare partnerships are usually taxed. The rules on what types of expenses are tax deductible are pretty similar. If you incur business expenses which are not repaid by your employer you can usually reclaim tax on them.

That wouldn't prevent some of the shenanigans described above. For example, giving my IP away for cheap to a subsidiary in a low tax jurisdiction that actually performs the sale.

No, it would, that's the point. If your subsidiary in the Bahamas sells something in France, it pays French VAT.

Exactly!

The problem is that European politicians and their sympathizers have gone to great lengths to make you think it is tax evasion that they are policing. Tax evasion is illegal, these companies read the rules and follow them, but in the EU they are still in jeopardy in the courts, because the courts are arbitrary.

It's because for an international company there is really no clear cut way to say what is tax evasion and what is not. If your company is incorporated in France, has offices in Ireland and serves customers all over the world, how do you calculate where to pay what?

Sovereign countries are free to set their tax rate to 0 in order to attract companies there.

I'm pretty sure Google does not have a problem figuring out that the source of it's profits are not occuring in Ireland.

There is no science to what the 'correct' level of tax is, and assigning which part of a multinational corporation is responsible for what dollar of profit is genuinely complicated.

As long as they are playing by the rules, no company has an obligation to try and guess what level of tax is fair for them to pay. Since they are taxed according to their interpretation of the situation (as represented in their account books) there isn't anything wrong with choosing an interpretation that is tax effective.

Oh, I am not implying the "rules" are correct by any means either. Yes, I am saying that just because the rules/laws permit a thing, doesn't mean it isn't broken. The whole point of courts is to decide what broken laws mean, governments to fix holes in the laws, and people to decide who the government is.

It's not that simple?

How do you tax a German company paying an Irish company to show ads in France?

much like the trolley problem and driverless cars, you can easily get lost in the weeds in a legitimate, complex theoretical question, when for a concrete problem a simple answer can easily be obtained. In fact, the theoretical question obscures or acts as cover for the concrete case. For driverless cars, you just apply the brakes. For google, do you outlaw "The double Irish with a Dutch sandwich"

It's not that a simple answer can't be obtained, it's that many different simple answers can be obtained...

sure, if you are trying to solve the fully parametric abstract equation over all possible inputs, which is precisely what I was saying to try to avoid.

In absence of a grand unified theory, tackle obvious concrete instances when they crop up.

If the different "simple" answers (which I am not sure exactly what that means) solve the problem, then I really do not care if there is some equivalence principle there; just pick one as long as it produces the concrete outcome that you want.

The problem can be roughly stated as: For a company registered in country I, selling product/service in country F, with inputs licensed from and/or created in countries N, U, B, G, A, and C, and costs incurred in a potentially different set of countries, what's the amount of tax due to each country represented in the graph?

There are many simple answers to that question; who gets to decide which simple answer is the one enacted? Countries F, I, and U are likely to disagree on which simple answer is "best", which is why we rely on laws and courts to frame and adjudicate the issue.

Outlaw what exactly? Subsidiaries? Licence Agreements? Profit/Loss calculations? The European Union? "The double Irish with a Dutch sandwich" is an emergent property of a bunch of laws "working as intended".

So what you really ask is to get rid of the rule of law so you can target the bad guy du jour directly. Just remember that you may be "the bad guy" tomorrow.

I'm merely stating why "make avoiding taxes illegal" is not a clear cut thing. Apple got to pay over 11 billion of back taxes to Ireland and another 500 million to France for example, so if there is clear fraud it's easy.

The difficulty is to have a legal framework and not just some judge saying "I'll know it's porn when I see it".

This being said I am not a lawyer.

>Sovereign countries are free to set their tax rate to 0 in order to attract companies there.

Then those companies should only sell products and services in those countries. Otherwise, something should be done about it. I'm not saying it's easy, but it can be improved.

So exporting should be illegal?

Doing business with tax havens should be illegal. A tax Haven creates an agreement between companies and a country to steal another country tax reveneu.

Tax havens produce close to nothing, so they have very small exports. It's just a legal arrangement that has nothing to do with production.

You are assuming that somehow that tax revenue is theirs in the first place.

What if that tax rate makes a business non-profitable in France but a money-making machine in Ireland?

Also, too much focus is centered around taxes when spurious regulations are generally more damning for a lot of companies. For example some friends of mine have attempted to start escape rooms, they have all abandoned their pursuits because here in Spain the legal framework is unclear. All escape rooms in this country are in a legal greyish area.

> You are assuming that somehow that tax revenue is theirs in the first place. The big corporations that evade taxes are using the economic power, infrastructure and legal systems of countries without contributing to any of them. That is money that the corporations owe to the citizens of those countries.

> What if that tax rate makes a business non-profitable in France but a money-making machine in Ireland? I see your point, they are centred about maximizing profit. But, there are other goals as well. The goal of improving the taxation system is related to broad social issues like wealth redistribution. It has nothing to do with the only goal is to maximize short term profits for companies.

> Also, too much focus is centered around taxes when spurious regulations are generally more damning for a lot of companies. For example some friends of mine have attempted to start escape rooms, they have all abandoned their pursuits because here in Spain the legal framework is unclear. All escape rooms in this country are in a legal greyish area.

This is one of the many reasons regulations take a long time to be in place for new kinds of business: https://www.news.com.au/world/europe/five-girls-locked-in-ho...

I hope that your friends find a good way to start escape rooms in the end. If it is their passion they will succeed. Regulations may be slow, but regulations get set and then people can do business safely for everyone involved.

Or more likely: fewer people do business. It would certainly explain Spain's economy.

Escape rooms and haunted houses are a nightmare in local fire code in the states as well. Ends up putting a lot of smaller productions out of business.

If it were that, I’d understand. The main issue my friends had was with declaring their “official activity”. In spain you need to declare what activity your bussiness is into, and the categories available are so restrictive and ill defined that a lot of people end up just making up something and going with it.

I’ve seen contractors with numbers in their paperwork that was obviously made up by putting a completely random number (they even admitted to that privately).

It’s important? No, is a risk that could destroy your bussiness? Certainly.

Wow that's pretty lame then. We have something similar but it's not really something you're held to, mostly just for them to have an idea what your deductions should be (or something like that, not a tax expert). Wondering, could they classify themselves as theater or similar? That's what's commonly used at least in the circles Im part of.

Tax havens are often highly desirable tourist destinations. Making it illegal to do business with them would anger a lot of tourists and is, frankly, a violation of freedom of movement.

But shouldn't they like pay taxes for where the customer is from?

Suppose a guy from US purchases the service, shouldn't tax be paid there. Isn't that how its supposed to work? Taking only in terms of Giants.

Note that there already is a tax that people are paying 'where the customers are'. It's the VAT, which is one of the biggest sources of income for a state.

To complicate the situation, a French citizen, living in Spain, the sole owner of a company incorporated in Ireland, buys software from an American company to run for a customer in Brazil.

Which country/countries should be able to tax the revenue?

The company would pay corporation tax in Ireland. The French citizen, if resident in Spain, would probably pay taxes in Spain (generally countries tax residents).

The customer may need to pay sales tax on the purchase to Brazil, if Brazil has such a thing.

But I agree with your point - it does get quite complicated and bureaucratic.

> The company would pay corporation tax in Ireland.

You'd assume that, but you could also very well be wrong. Depending on tax treaties and the "effective place of management" principle, he could be liable for corporation tax in Spain or in both Spain and Ireland.

One reason why tax laws get very complicated very fast is because every country wants to tax everything it can which inevitably means that two different countries end up taxing the same thing. To avoid this, you get double taxation treaties and loopholes.

In the example above the American company presumably has most of its employees in the US and ought to pay significant tax there somehow.

It will: the process of paying employees is heavily taxed. Who writes the check and what the nominal salary is doesn't matter too much... between the cost to the company, and the employee getting to spend the money, the government gets what 30-40%? That's a lot. And it's hard to avoid, you can't move a hundred engineers to the Bahamas at the stroke of a pen.

It gets really hairy in cases like Google and Facebook, where the guy paying the service might be a US agency paying to show ads to YouTube/FB users in Europe.

My guess: Big corporations often have more potential to outsource, and are better known, and have a stronger PR and legal department. These traits give them a much better negotiation position (don't remember that governments profit from taxes, so it's a bit of a demand and supply thing: If taxes are high in one country, a big company will threaten to move to another, which costs the country money in the end).

At least, this is the argument that the Dutch government uses to abandon as many taxes for companies as possible.

Yeah, the Dutch government, ran by the VVD...

First, it is not tax evasion if the law is being followed. The real problem is that tax laws have these various loopholes, and the question is why the law is written that way. Almost always it is because wealthy people benefit from the loopholes and lobby for politicians to either keep them in place or replace them with new loopholes (which is the likely outcome from this French tax). When the tax code is complicated enough, as it will inevitably become over time, you wind up with a situation where accountants find creative ways to combine different aspects of the tax code to minimize a company or individual's tax bill.

Political economy and a race to the bottom. Though take hope, there are many people working on this and the silver lining of tech's centralization is that it will be easy to chase them down once the right laws are in place.

Tax evasion is already illegal.

Tax evasion is, but tax avoidance isn’t.

What's 'tax avoidance'? Doesn't everyone avoid tax when they claim expenses and make deductions?

yes - so maximizing your use of any method to reduce your tax burden is (a) the smart thing to do and (b) the (a)moral imperative of a corporation.

not a judgement call, just not sure how you frame the raison d'etre for something that oesn't embody life to begin with.

Why moral imperative? Perhaps you mean ethical or legal, but is not even legally required, so far as I know, that a corporation must maximize return to investors.

More broadly, society created the concept of the corporation and imbued it with valuable privileges such as limited liability and a potentially favorable tax regime. Some argue it would be morally reasonable to require it balance the interests of stakeholders.

Evasion is a bug in the tax code. Avoidance is a feature. Laws are written to create the possibility of avoidance - e.g. we add a 20% tax on cigarettes. We create a 20% tax credit on solar panels. We don't tax interest gains off of savings accounts.

For what it's worth it's pointless to complain about tax law complexity. Complexity increases with the amount of money you're trying to drag out of the economy. The more money you want the greater the temptation to create loopholes because they end up being worth more. Imagine a country where the tax rate is 100%. If you pass a law that taxes building cars at 90% you've effectively created an industry. Compare that with how much you'll be loved if the tax rate is 10% and you lower the tax on making cars to 9%. Still good but you'll only garner like not love.

Honestly this is why the details of tax law - how fair it is for example - only marginally interest me. The overall rate - and for that you might as well include borrowing, so it's easier to just ask - what percentage of GDP does the government spend are a lot more interesting to me.

Exactly, and when companies do the same thing it’s legally considered perfectly fine.

Morally can be a different matter, though.

Illegal avoidance is called evasion.

You make it sound as if taxation is a good thing. In much of the world capitalism, retained profits and growing the economy is used to make people wealthier. The countries with fastest growth and highest employment, healthiest companies tend to have lower tax rates (China, USA).

Countries that treat companies as if they a problem that need more tax (much of Western Europe) tend to have high unemployment and poorly performing economies where young people leave. Europe has the advantage that it got rich through its empires (and low taxes) and is now stagnating into poverty. Companies and people already pay a lot of tax compared to the rest of the world, Europeans should be trying to reduce this burden instead of figuring out how to tax more.

> Countries that treat companies as if they a problem that need more tax (much of Western Europe) tend to have high unemployment and poorly performing economies where young people leave.

Maybe countries with high unemployment and poorly performing economies have a problem with companies paying too little taxes.

How does that fix the problem though? The government doesn't create jobs, companies do.

If only it were that simple.

The countries with fastest growth and highest employment, healthiest companies tend to have lower tax rates (China, USA).

Another yardstick for comparing countries is how they treat and take care of the poor ones. High-tax countries often fare well in that and China, USA not so much.

Thanks a lot to all your answers.

My question was badly formulated. I meant to ask: why are we tolerating this situation?

Regardless of tax evasion / tax optimization or whatever is the wording, most people agree that these companies are not paying the amount of taxes they should. I get the why and how these companies are doing this. I just don't understand why we, as a society, accept that. Our society has never been so rich, yet we see decline in education, health, etc. I do think we should only have progress: more culture, better life, less work, etc.

> most people agree that these companies are not paying the amount of taxes they should

They will say this because the news tells them this is true. But it seems far from obvious to me.

If a multinational sets up shop in France, then a whole pile of taxes do get paid: VAT is 20% of all sales. Then there is income tax / social security / etc. I don't know any French details, but I'm quite sure it's above 30% in total... all of which you should think of as being collected on the transaction that A pays Mr. B. If the company spends most of their revenue on salaries, then this already sounds like order of 50% of throughput goes to tax.

In addition to this, they may make some profit. And it seems pretty hard to know where the profit was made. How much is iOS worth? Or the Starbucks logo... quite a bit, your groggy airport customers know what they're getting, but there's no really obvious way to put a unique number on this. And thus it's honestly difficult to say where the profit was made.

Yet this is often the whole violent argument! Over maybe 20% of say 5% profit, 1% of sales... 1/50th of the taxes already collected above. If they wished to collect more, they could easily tweak those numbers. I'd go so far as to suggest that we should just give up, set the tax on corporate profits to zero globally... but at least they are generally moving down.

> Our society has never been so rich, yet we see decline in education, health, etc

But we collect more tax than ever. It it buys us worse healthcare, or education, than it did in the past, then the problem may lie elsewhere.

Yeah, I find that the tax avoidance issue is overblown. The numbers look large because they have collected over several years, but in the grand scheme of things they're a cup in the bucket compared to VAT, payroll and income taxes.

You have to remember that VAT, payroll, and income taxes roughly scale with revenue, but corporate taxes scale with profits.

That is a great philosophical question. My banal answer: entertainment is also better than it ever has been, and the messes of people are this more numb and manipulable than they ever have been.

Anything taxed has to have an asset value determined for it, and reliably recorded. This is extremely complicated to enforce on almost anything if you sit down and really think about how - if it were the only thing you had of value to offer - you might be able to hide it's true value.

The point isn't tax evasion, it's France wanting more tax revenue without pissing off the public. Remember that the yellow vests protest started because of a tax increase on the general public.

> Couldn't we just ban tax evasion? What makes it so hard? (honest question)

Two things, mostly. The first is lack of financial transparency. The other is how corporate tax is levied.

With respect to transparency, there's no shortage of options to create structures in tax havens such that there's little if any paper trail that ties it to their owners or beneficiaries. And just in passing, the US and the UK are not void of problems here; on the contrary, they regularly appear on worst offenders lists:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr/06/panama-paper...

The other issue is basically related to accounting and how corporate tax gets levied. If you're a multinational, it's possible to set up a subsidiary in a place with to no corporate tax and make your international profits all appear there instead of coming home where they get taxed. (This is the reason US businesses were so many billions abroad in the run up to Trump's tax cuts.) Related to this is the ability to move money out of countries that do tax, using questionable licensing fees and accounting tricks the like. Example:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2016/04/20/mcdonalds-fr...

Anyway, to fix this you basically need to get all countries together so there's more transparency, and dig into how corporate taxes get levied.

Europe is losing ~globalization and we are fighting over the scraps. Which European country do you think will be overall obviously better in ten years? And not in the sense that "everything gets better", but in the sense of having a high rate of success in converting progress to prosperity. I don't know of any.

From my travels it sounds like (some) Europeans don’t work that much compared to their American or Asian counterparts. Like, French citizens gets way more vacation than anyone I know.

It’s obviously good to live a decent life and spend time with family, but at some point it cuts into your national productivity.

I don't generally think it is that big a concern. You are unlikely to outwork people, especially with something like 20%. Or more specifically there are always people with less to lose than you do. It isn't something that European countries can compete by, and especially not smaller countries. I think greater concerns are systematic defect. But there is no meaning to have a lack of education, apartments or other things that would mean good conditions for being productive. Those are the things you can't afford as a smaller country that wants to be competitive.

The Eastern European countries have been growing consistently for years. If you only look at economics countries like Poland have been doing very well.

You have to remember Western Europe has developed economies. They aren't likely to grow at the rate Asian countries are as those economies have a lot of catching up to do.

Also European countries don't necessarily have the same priorities as the US for example. Most of us prefer decent workers rights and consumer protections over 1/2% on GDP.

>Most of us prefer decent workers rights and consumer protections over 1/2% on GDP.

Weird framing considering inviduals don’t care about the GDP. It would probably be better to say that people in the US tend to care about higher incomes vs state entitlements. This is evident in the fact that brining up tax cost per individual is an easy way to kill universal healthcare plans.

Absolutely the eastern countries have been growing.

This is because they went from a system of extreme socialism, and moved towards capitalism.

They still might not be as capitalist as America is these days, but they are doing much better.

I am not so much concerned about growth as such, but about European countries inability to convert progress into prosperity.

This might not be the best example, but take cars. A country like the US would build a interstate highway system, probably subsidize car manufacturing and go on to create a huge factor of progress for decades to come. You have successfully converted technological progress into a meaningful factor for society. While in a less developed country only the rich will have cars and roads will be broken. Of course these days that era is coming to an end.

The same is true for other things that are progressing. Yet, in few to no European countries would you expect that the fundamentals of the information age like education, health care, housing, infrastructure and work environment will get better and more accessible in the next ten years. At least not organically i.e. without a crash.

What you can say in most countries is that education is getting more competitive, health care more complex, housing less accessible, infrastructure more expensive and work environment less comfortable. This is people fighting each other trying to get whatever there is, not somewhere where people are preparing for the future as societies.

So the only conclusion I can make, while it certainly might not be the correct one, is that Europe is losing. Because if Europe was winning we would be investing in the future and getting it better. Unless we are just hopelessly arrogant, which doesn't bode well either.

>Yet, in few to no European countries would you expect that the fundamentals of the information age like education, health care, housing, infrastructure and work environment will get better and more accessible in the next ten years.

I do expect that. Of course there are some problems like an ageing population and the fiscal irresponsibility of some countries, but those problems aren't unique to Europe.

To take your example of the highway system there is huge development going on across Europe.[1]..[8]

Your conclusion is too gloomy, I know it's the standard message spouted by the media but I really don't think it's true.

[1] https://www.theb1m.com/video/norways-47bn-coastal-highway [2] http://www.crossrail.co.uk [3] https://theurbandeveloper.com/articles/designing-cities-with... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotthard_Base_Tunnel [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Speed_2 [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blanka_tunnel_complex\ [7] http://www.vde8.de/---_site.index..ls_dir._function.set__lan...

The example of the highway system was more for its time. Europe did, and has, just as the US built a lot of infrastructure over the years. But it is still lackluster in many places.

Though the real lack of conversion isn't in one specific thing, it is that Europe (and probably much of the world for that matter) can't offer people good opportunities. I hope I am too gloomy. It is just a hard argument to make that in terms of life prospects it wasn't better to be young ten years ago than it is today in many places.

If people believe that someone else won't come and eat their lunch over that I think they are wrong. As I alluded to in another comment, Europe probably lost at least half of the tech industry it could have had if it wasn't for capital going into things like rents.

I people were expecting things to get better they wouldn't essentially hold back growth. We would see new rapid affordable development because not doing that would be losing out. But I don't see countries being concerned about that. They are perfectly happy taking decades building things and going over budget. They let mortgages double or triple, so everyone who came before win at the expense of those coming after. They sell companies with valuable technology are to foreign interests.

So I don't really understand how someone e.g. would end up working less when they have twice the mortgage than their parents and the companies they work for are owned foreign investors who wouldn't mind moving activities abroad at any point.

And to that point almost all major successful companies are vertically integrating today, because with information being accessible there isn't much reason not to control your own activities. Yet, most European countries are doing the opposite. Outsourcing their main activities to complex constellations.

What exactly are they losing?

As a European, I feel like the EU, in general, is on the losing side of globalization.

There is not a single European internet company in the top 15. I think part of the reason for this is cultural (aversion to risk), part of it is due to the environment (relatively low salaries for IT, limited access to venture capital) and a part of it is due to bad policies being enacted by the EU - most notably the EU VAT on digital services, the GDPR and now the Copyright directive.

When it comes to digital services, Europe is seen as a place to sell things, not make them. This state of affairs has left Germany and France bitter over the success of American tech giants, particularly as they put ever increasing pressure on local businesses. So the EU reacted in pretty much the only way it knows how - by introducing legislation against said businesses. This had the unintentional consequence of targeting European tech startups as well, making Europe an even worse place to start a new business than it already was. Instead of a single digital market, you have 28 different national markets, each with their own rules and regulation, only ~11 of which are actually interesting due to their size and purchasing power.

At the same time, austerity policies enacted after the 2008 recession have resulted in cuts in the scope and quality of public services. Prices for most goods and services are rather high. The middle and lower classes are particularly hard hit, leaving many to wonder whether globalization is worth it.

> [...] and a part of it is due to bad policies being enacted by the EU - most notably the EU VAT on digital services, the GDPR and now the Copyright directive.

These rules came into effect the last year or so, the "battle" for the tech industry was fought ten to twenty years ago. US companies all have had a huge advantage "only" being under the (at the time very criticized) DMCA while European companies had to abide by local laws, often in multiple jurisdictions. Large US companies also avoided paying the same taxes European companies had to, amassing large reserves for acquisitions of any successful European companies.

That Europe can't produce technology companies is false, at least to the same extent that applies to the US. They just either got outmaneuvered by large US entities, got acquired or ended up limited in their growth by things like housing. If you look at e.g. Sweden you have MySQL (eventually acquired by Oracle), Skype (eventually acquired by Microsoft), Minecraft (acquired by Microsoft), Spotify (public with many offices). Any of these companies could have been really big domestically, if it wasn't for it being hard to grow and easy to get bought.

These rules, whether you agree with them or not, should have been there 20 years ago so everyone had to play by the same rules.

The VAT directive on digital goods most certainly did not come into effect in the last year or so.

> US companies all have had a huge advantage "only" being under the (at the time very criticized) DMCA while European companies had to abide by local laws, often in multiple jurisdictions.

So we agree that Europe, in general, is a worse startup environment compared to the USA?

Also, I think it's pretty disingenuous to claim that large companies like Apple or Microsoft got big because they didn't pay taxes in Europe.

> Any of these companies could have been really big domestically, if it wasn't for it being hard to grow and easy to get bought.

They were big domestically. They were even significant internationally. Just not nearly enough to match US companies.

> Also, I think it's pretty disingenuous to claim that large companies like Apple or Microsoft got big because they didn't pay taxes in Europe.

I didn't, that is another story. I am saying that they had an easier time than they should have competing with and acquiring any European competition by effectively having a ~30% advantage and discount.

> They were big domestically. They were even significant internationally. Just not nearly enough to match US companies.

They all except Spotify got acquired before they could potentially become big companies. If you want to have large companies with thousands of employees in Europe they have to survive as domestic companies. Spotify had potential to become one, but at that point the Stockholm housing market was already in a bubble. https://www.ft.com/content/bdf04bc2-6a0f-11e6-a0b1-d87a9fea0...

Essentially competitiveness. Countries that are, or at least aspires to be, competitive would be restricting foreign companies and invest in infrastructure. While Europe is doing the opposite. We are selling our companies and restricting the building of infrastructure.

And while you can point to specific examples, like startups, that are successful in Europe it is mostly an illustration of how much we are leaving on the table.

switzerland

> Is it because of bad laws?

No, it's because of the good laws. Taxation is theft.

And it's not called tax evasion but tax planning. No one is obliged to pay more than the minimum.

> Taxation is theft.

No it isn't. Property rights are determined by the state, hence taxation by the state cannot be considered theft.

That’s not really a valid argument against “taxation is theft”.

As a citizen born in a country, you never enter into an agreement that the government should be able to take a cut of all of your transactions, but that’s what happens and refusal to partake results in violence (an arrest and time in prison).

It’s no different than the local mob going around giving beatdowns to get protection money from businesses. The people that voted for the government sure think it’s different, but it’s not much different to the people who didn’t.

There is a reason they had to put the ability to tax right in the constitution. And there is also a reason the US is no longer part of Britain.

No, but you also don't have to partake in the economic system, that is your choice.

It's easy to establish the duty to pay your taxes even using "freedom of contract". By stepping foot on a public road, you accepted the terms and conditions.

Market extremism is a funny thought experiment, but ultimately absurd.

I agree that taxation isn't necessarily theft, as part of the social contract, but aren't property rights at least in some cases fundamental?

Dude I know this is weird but looking at your comment history I'd love to talk to you. If you're up for it, my contact info is in my profile.

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