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Comment by Turukawa | Hacker News Reader

I provided some of the data used in this article (via FOI-request, used at sqwyre.com).

The scale of the number of the hereditaments (taxable units) is remarkable and overloads local tax authorities. We're talking thousands, with regular tenant changes. Even in central London, there are only a handful of municipal staff to deal with all businesses.

What you end up with is equivalent to a denial-of-service attack against rates authority staff. They're overwhelmed.

That's the real risk to communities. If tax relief claims are industrialised, it puts endless pressure on the services those taxes were supposed to pay for. These are local taxes, so that's libraries, community centres, road maintenance, etc.

WeWork may not be a tech company when it comes to what they're selling, but it is when it comes to how they deal with tax.

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> If tax relief claims are industrialised, it puts endless pressure on the services those taxes were supposed to pay for. These are local taxes, so that's libraries, community centres, road maintenance, etc.

I can understand how the existing system may have issues with this - but the total presence of WeWork definitely doesn't qualify for a rebate... and if the filing rate of the company seems absurd then the government should reject all the filings by that company and fine the company trying to abuse the system.

Unlike computer logic where weird edge cases can be exploited due to the speed and complexity of the system... when it comes to taxes this stuff is going in front of human beings and the government can always bring a hammer down.

> and the government can always bring a hammer down.

And if the government lacks the power to do so, that needs to be changed.

From a sibling comment group it sounds like this issue actually is a problem of the government lacking the hammer due to an extreme effort from lobbying... so hopefully WeWork abusing this system is the straw that breaks the camel's back and forces all the faux-small business real estate dealers to pay appropriate taxes.

This tax, which appears to be an effort to provide some relief to the victims of real estate owners that are gouging small business, is actually just benefiting those owners.

Government works on law not on what makes sense, if the punishment you are describing is not in the law. they can't do it! and have to process all the filings.

Courts can sometimes see through such abuse, but only as far as the law can be reasonably interpreted.

Government works on law not on what makes sense, if the punishment you are describing is not in the law. they can't do it! and have to process all the filings.

I think just about all legal systems have catch-all regulations that allow for fines for abuse.

Moreover, law isn't actually mechanical rules like computer science - people who skirt the law systematically often find themselves facing serious legal problems and intention is a big consideration in some (but not all) regulations. "Obstruction of justice", "contempt of court" and so-forth are broad statutes that let courts lean on those abusing the system. etc.

The actual problem, I'd note, is that courts and cities are much more hesitant to go after large, monied interests as compared small interests. A local crank doing what Uber, Airbnb or others do could go to jail, these companies just count their money.

A banker mailed a building brick by brick via post office. Was cheaper than standard shipping.

https://www.ksl.com/article/32424611/vernal-bank-built-by-br...

If the postage was appropriately priced for the size and weight of his packages then the USPS didn't lose anything from his clever plan.

It looks like the post office priced postage at a loss of I think 21 cents per 50 pounds. Government lost about $20,000 to $30,000 annually.

From the sibling link:

> This massive shipment was noteworthy not only for its size, but also because it destroyed one of the Uintah Railway Company's trucks. The truck's brakes failed and it started coasting backwards after breaking a drive chain while struggling uphill, loaded with several thousand bricks. The truck then turned over and caught fire. The driver was not injured, but most of the bricks were lost.

I imagine USPS pricing didn't account for that incident!

That one's completely the company's fault. If anything bricks should be much easier to balance across trucks than other collections of shipments, because the shipper knows they all weigh the same.

better link IMO, since it has sources instead of newsbite fluff: https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-history/bank-of-ver...

Enjoyed reading that, thank you for the link.

> Government works on law not on what makes sense

That is a very American sentiment, most governments doesn't consist of ~50% lawyers.

For example in Sweden the government is full of union members from the working class, they have very different view of what role the government should have with respect to company abuse. The result is that basically all laws are worded in such a way that if any ambiguity exists it will disfavor private companies.

I thought governments charged a fee with every filing, which should allow them to scale their processing resources with the volume of submissions?

Abd startups/kickstarters/people set prices "which should allow them to scale" - but they are always based on assumptions which sometimes turn out to be incorrect is that scale happens to be several orders of magnitude larger that the people who made those assumptions.

We don't want government departments to be setting fees based on worst case upper bounds of processes with poor Big O performance. Nobody wants to fund through fees or taxes, say, a DMV who are perfectly set up to reissue every single driver's license every day. There's a very reasonable assumption that driver's licenses are lost/stolen at a fairly consistent rate and to size the department and processes to perform "well enough" at that replacement rate. If a startup found a way to monetise revoked driver's licences, and started offering to buy them off people for $50 resulting in thousands of extra license replacement requests - the DMV would be perfectly entitled to change their rules and say "you only get one inexpensive license replacement every 3 years. Additional replacement license will now cost $1500 each". (Not a _super great example, because there's presumably laws against selling your driver's license, but ignoring that - I think this argument stands...)

> when it comes to taxes this stuff is going in front of human beings and the government can always bring a hammer down.

I cannot believe these kinds of policies are even being entertained. The government should decidedly not be able to 'bring a hammer down' based on their feeling about a company. That's totalitarianism.

In a civilized society with limited government, the most important thing about a government is that it follows the law and that the law is applied equally. By all means, the government should follow its procedures for changing the regulations to achieve the desired policy. But under no circumstance should it arbitrarily go after companies it deems to be 'immoral'. Moreover, if the company has followed law at the time, then there is nothing the government should be able to do to retroactively make what was legal, illegal.

These basics of civilization are encoded in our constitution as prohibitions on both bills of attainder as well as ex post facto laws.

Your proposal to pursue lawlessness reminds me of this dialogue from the play 'A man for all seasons', about St Thomas More, English lawyer, philosopher, and martyr. In the dialogue, Thomas More, who is the current prosecutor, is being asked by his son-in-law and daughters to arrest someone for speech which More and the son-in-law find repugnant. Moreover, the speech in question is what is going to lead to More's own execution, which More could have prevented by arresting him illegally. More rebukes all of them:

More: Why, what has he done?

Margaret More: He's bad!

More: There is no law against that.

Will Roper: There is! God's law!

More: Then God can arrest him.

Alice: While you talk, he's gone!

More: And go he should, if he was the Devil himself, until he broke the law!

Roper: So now you'd give the Devil benefit of law!

More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

Roper: I'd cut down every law in England to do that!

More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast– man's laws, not God's– and if you cut them down—and you're just the man to do it—do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law for my own safety's sake.

It's not about whether the government dislikes a company, but whether it believes the company is acting in bad faith.

This is why the real world runs on reasonable people, backed up with lawyers and judges to interpret laws and the mis-use of them either through badly written laws or unexpected consequences of reasonable intent - and why even people strongly publicly opposed to that end up reinventing it and forking Etherium when someone read "the code that is the law" more carefully than the people who wrote it.

A judge will (sometimes) look at a nov el abuse of the details of a law as its written, and make a determination based on the clear intent of the lawmakers even if it's not specifically covered by the written embodiment of thew law.

Anyone who thinks that's bad idea needs to get out more. (I'm not saying it always works out "best", but not having the ability for someone to say "Hang on, that's not the _intent_ of this tax rebate. You can no longer abuse it this way." is critically important, for a species that cannot write bug-free code in the super-restricted space of computer languages, never mind in the vastly more complex and error-prone space of human languages for laws and legal contracts.

"WeWork may not be a tech company when it comes to what they're selling, but it is when it comes to how they deal with tax."

I've never thought about it that way before- interesting.

> WeWork may not be a tech company when it comes to what they're selling, but it is when it comes to how they deal with tax.

Not sure what this is supposed to mean. Companies finding ways to pay less taxes isn't a privilege of the Tech industry

Thank you for this. Are you a Newspeak house guy? Your work is great and it reminds me a lot of the stuff I see coming out of that place

Of course, you can not give the tax relief claims to multinationals until it has been verified ;)

Doesn’t it stand to reason that the taxation authority should scale or become more efficient like any business when there is an increased demand for services?

The government is not a business and should not be run like one.

No.

We have here in Australia a perfect example of why this is an awful idea.

Our social security department equivalent is issuing "robo-debts" to people who've previously received various forms of social security payments, based of flawed algorithms using data of insufficient resolution to actually determine what somebody owed (or did not owe). They were matching tax office records of annual income, and foolishly assuming that figure could be accurately just divided by 26 to get an accurate fortnightly figure - then claiming people who'd been paid social security which would have been incorrect based on that flawed average owed the money back. And forcing the recipient to proved that debt was incorrect. Even when the recipients had provided fortnightly earnings reports already. And with the obvious-to-just-about-anyone reality that people on welfare do not in general have regular and secure salaries over the timeframe of years. If you are out of work for 3 months and claiming welfare, then stop claiming it when you get a job again - it's insane to send you a debt notice for the 3 months worth of welfare you claimed and were perfectly entitled to, just because the other 9 month of the year you were gainfully employed.

But here we are.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/apr/06/centr... https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-08-27/centrelink-seizes-tax...

To me, this is exactly what I expect to happen when government "scales or becomes more efficient like any business". You get MBAs running projects like this, you get consultants bidding on the work, you get underpaid and over burdened developers writing code with poorly written requirements just deciding "I don't have a list of fortnightly income figures. Fuck it, I'll just divide this yearly figure by 26 and close this ticket."

This is the awful reality of the sort of perverse incentives that result from trying to run welafare or taxation "like any business". We (as society) need to be better than this.

> denial-of-service attack against rates authority staff

This is presumably part of the point of deliberately underfunding tax agencies.

> What you end up with is equivalent to a denial-of-service attack against rates authority staff. They're overwhelmed.

On the other side it provides pressure on tax authorities to finally digitize their processes and automate what's possible. Ideally, an application review should not be more than 10 or 15 minutes - clerk opens digital file, reviews attached floor plannings and previous tax filings/business plans (or the system automatically has the flag "this is a small business" attached), clicks on either approve or deny button, system automatically sends paperwork to the applicant.

The only way that forces authorities to modernize their processes is when the demand grows large enough that the ROI calculation proves it.

Would be nice ;) although government IT modernisation programs don't always go so well...

Not wanting to call you a point-haired-boss, but:

"clerk opens digital file, reviews attached floor plannings and previous tax filings/business plans (or the system automatically has the flag "this is a small business" attached), clicks on either approve or deny button, system automatically sends paperwork to the applicant."

Sounds almost exactly like the sort of comment that will emerge from a PHB when it is suggested that a proper business requirement spec and functional spec is needed.

I imagine the number of edge cases involved in"reviews attached floor plannings and previous tax filings/business plans" could be rather terrifying.

They also have to check what's happening in other authorities. From experience, there is no standardisation of anything, not of definitions, data structure, methods of data management. Government data systems are archaic, so doing those cross-authority tests to see whether business qualify for reliefs is real slow.

I'd love to see a standard schema for rates data, but that's unlikely.

The other day on software architecture thread someone mentioned how to solve a part of this problem: requirements on software architecture, which get used in bidding. Software companies are very unhappy about it, because it means they won't get to charge the government several hundred times for the same solution, but the result has a good chance to be interoperable with other systems under similar requirements.

The thread is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20786810.

Edge cases can always be handled more extensively. My post was aimed at the 99% open/approve/shut cases that make up the bulk of stuff.

Basically, free humans from pointless stuff that can readily be automated and use their valuable time to do stuff where human knowledge is required.

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