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Comment by flippedbit | Hacker News Reader

Tax minimization is a form of tax avoidance rather than tax evasion (Not saying it’s good, rather just that google weren’t breaking any laws).

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There's no such a tax avoidance rule that is allowed and tax evasion is not. Also avoid and evade are similar term.

Avoid > keep away from or stop oneself from doing

Evade > escape or avoid (someone or something), especially by guile or trickery.

This is the reason why many US tech companies got fined in Europe (Apple and Google are one of them)

P.S. can someone explain why I get down votes for something factual? This forum is ridiculous at times

sole definitions of avoid and evade are completely irrelevant, "tax avoidance" and "tax evasions" are well understood syntagms, former meaning utilizing any legal means in order to reduce the amount of taxes paid. simply put, tax avoidance is good accounting. tax evasion is illegal and is an action in which you're directly breaking a law.

what tech companies were doing in europe was utilizing every possible loophole in order to reduce the amount of taxes paid. of course, that angered sovereign nations which (rightly) felt cheated and they acted by applying pressures to ireland and others. some (france) even fined some of the companies, those fines were most likely in a grey area, but tech firms knew very well what they were doing, understood the motivations behind those fines and generally concluded that it's a bad idea angering a nation in whose market you're operating. realpolitik.

I posted link below as reply to another comment. They were evading taxes and was charged in Italy and France and even on Ireland.

And no, it was not technically legal because many European countries do not distinguish between avoidance and evasion. There's no such a thing and is evasion (no matter how smartly you do that).

https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/31/21044662/google-end-tax-...

> Also avoid and evade are similar term. > P.S. can someone explain why I get down votes for something factual? This forum is ridiculous at times

"Tax avoidance" and "tax evasion" are technical terms in accounting with very specific definitions and entailments, and the difference isn't just in the English words. Most accounting textbooks and courses cover this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_avoidance

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_evasion

Even in Europe, this technical difference is recognized, but with one catch: the EU has enacted a counter-avoidance directive (ATAD, Jan 2019) - evasion is always illegal. This is not the case in most places around the world.

Infographic:

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/headlines/economy/201...

Fiscal vocabulary:

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/headlines/economy/201...

Finally, the HN guidelines provide good tips on how comment productively. (see the In Comments section) This helps us learn from each other's experiences.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

So if you focus on my first sentence maybe you can understand what do I mean.

> There's no such a tax avoidance rule that is allowed and tax evasion is not.

As I've said in many European countries both avoidance and evasion are illegal and my reply was about that since the OP implied that avoidance is a good thing while evasion is not. I let you read the other replies in this thread for the link that prove the charges to Google in Europe as I'm tired to post it.

P.S. Europe is not one country as is US and we don't have a federal state. Again, as I've stated many times, many European countries had this rules way before they were standardized at European level as testified by the fines that Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook had got in some European countries for tax avoidance.

Hope this clarifies and thanks for your link I gonna study that.

You're relying on the dictionary definitions for "avoidance" and "evasion" to make your argument, but "tax avoidance" and "tax evasion" are industry-accepted terms with clearly differentiated meanings to describe different behavior. Tax avoidance tells a truth that takes advantage of legal loopholes, and is therefore legal not to pay a higher amount of taxes. Tax evasion attempts to commit fraud on legal paperwork in order to not pay taxes which are legally required to be paid. They are not the same thing.

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