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Comment by devwastaken | Hacker News Reader

Legal /=/ moral

But making them equal is the goal. When they are unequal we create moral hazards. Moral hazard like this has to be least appealing part of having shareholders.

Do you mean in all areas of life or specifically companies / shareholders?

A person cheating on their spouse would pretty commonly be considered to be doing something "immoral"

Yet it would be ridiculous to make something like that illegal

I think the attempt to make moral and legal always align creates plenty of hazards itself

Especially if the moral code the law is based on something external and nowhere near universal (like religious sources, which disagree with each other, etc)

One could argue that they have a moral obligation to their shareholders to minimize their tax burden.

I can't even imagine a moral obligation to pay excess taxes, that's simply not how taxes work.

It's a problem for shareholders too: When the money is "stuck" ex-US and can't be brought back to the US to pay its shareholders.

If your money is in a shell that you cannot reach/touch, do you really have it?

And if you can't, why is it on the balance sheet as if it were cash that you could reach?

This is about money that was already outside the US. I'm not convinced that shuffling euro money around hurt the shareholders.

I can't admit I understand exactly what's going on in this case, but usually the story is that companies claim they have no US tax liability on revenue kept in a non-US subsidiary.

And the same companies stuff all the non-US revenue into a low-tax subsidiary, even when it's effectively earned in high-tax ex-US jurisdictions to avoid their taxes too.

> I can't admit I understand exactly what's going on in this case

That's exactly the problem! These are extremely complex situations where there usually doesn't exist any clear answer. If there did, large corporations almost certainly would not take these steps.

If there were clear laws, then taking these steps could be criminal tax fraud. Blame the regulators.

There's nothing stopping nations from writing clearer tax laws.

That would be a business or contractual obligation. There is nothing personal about that relationship.

There's nothing personal about my relationship with the tax authorities.

By phrasing it as excess taxes you've already begged the question. You could also phrase it as paying your share or pulling your weight.

Excess taxes, i.e. taxes not required by the law.

You've already linked the concept of excess to legality, definitionally. This is why you lack the ability to understand what a moral amount could be.

That's fair. Do you know what a moral amount would be?

I don't know, but I also doubt that anyone else really knows.

I assure you I don't know the exact number but I can imagine that non-zero moral amount exists.

That's fair, but the amount taxes Activision Blizzard are paying is non-zero. Are they doing wrong? If yes, how much should the pay?

which applies whether the stated tax rate is 1% or 75%, so a practically useless response

unless the idea is that any written tax rate is moral if it comes from the government, which also means any legal means to mitigate the tax rate is also moral because it comes from the government

Morality exists outside of what the law states.

You're suggesting that because you can imagine both a too strict and too lenient law, morality is an impossible concept?

> You're suggesting that because you can imagine both a too strict and too lenient law, morality is an impossible concept?

no, not enough information has been provided to make that decision and that grandparent-OP should elaborate on their stance

I believe everyone having the same morality is an impossible concept.

I'm not sure that's relevant to whether you personally find it moral. This conversation could exist from a personal perspective of what you find moral.

That said, even if we all have different morals it seems they're mostly compatible.

There is nothing immoral about legally minimizing your tax liability. This is like saying that it's immoral for me to contribute to my Roth IRA.

The tax law is written to incentivize desired behavior. We all benefit when you save for retirement so that you aren't a burden to society later.

But loopholes are different. If you discovered a loophole that made it so your landlord can not enforce rent collection, would you stop paying rent ? That's basically what these companies are doing.

One's person loophole is another person's well-lobbied IRS rule.

Many, many people would believe it is just fine if they found a loophole that set their personal taxes to 0%. Even more would be fine with a loophole that reduced their taxes by 50%. Nearly everyone would be fine with loophole that reduced it by 5%.

There's only one way to handle this large moral gray area: pass laws and IRS rules to close the loopholes that experts deem excessive.

> If you discovered a loophole that made it so your landlord can not enforce rent collection, would you stop paying rent

I certainly would. Thats why you have to be clear with the law and enforcement.

Blizzard takes significant advantage of the product of taxes massively disproportionate to any individual. They have an obligation to pay into it how they use it, and they have the money but purposefully are going around it. There is a lot immoral about it.

If you do it legally, there is nothing illegal about it. If you do it illegally then it's illegal.

If you are doing it in such a way as to violate the social contract, then regardless of legality, I think a case could be made that it is immoral.

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