The politicians we vote in deliberately create laws that allow large companies to pay little to no tax. It is not an accident or a sneaky corporation that outwitted a dumb politician, it is by design.
My point is that it would be more productive to focus on fixing the system than just getting angry at companies for "cheating".
Its not like the corporations haven't been using their financial influence, particularly after Citizen's United, to influence the rules.
We need to start approaching more taxation rules at a trading/travel block level. E.g. G12 say minimum 25% corporate tax or any product/service that involves non-complainant countries has a X% duty type thing.... or something down that concept route.
I think the real rich person law they politicians have supported and can influence is capital gains tax. Capital gains at a certain point is income. There's a reason CEO's take a $1 salary, they are clearly not living on that.
The Section 482-7 regs were written by the IRS to control how intellectual property is shifted offshore. The valuation methods outlined in the article were questionable. I read the regs multiple times to understand them and made an Excel valuation model to follow their rules.
Don't think the IRS realized they created terrible, ridiculous theoretical models. Don't think it was intentional either. Just a few people that didn't understand the implications and congress that signed the code into law without being able to understand it. Tax code for valuing IP is highly complex.
The US government writes terrible tax code in my opinion, mainly because they're just not very good. They're not as good as top private sector tax lawyers.
I empathize with the "You make the tax laws @SenWarren; we just follow them. If you don't like the laws you've created, by all means, change them" sentiment. Multinational corporations have to comply with tax laws from multiple countries that are arbitrary and complex.
I don't think any of us here could come up with a tax code that cannot be exploited. And of course large companies will exploit any loophole, all of us do when filing our taxes.
Maybe the problem is the existence of such powerful companies. Once you have them, it's very hard for politicians to stay on top of them.
To be clear, I'm not saying that there's no corruption or politicians favoring large companies. But most loopholes used by companies tend to stem from good intentions. It's like in IT security, there are backdoors but most bugs still have a benign origin.
Good governance is hard. And megacorps are an advanced persistent threat that goes to great lengths to claim exceptions for itself.
i really don't think this is true, many big companies are hopelessly bureaucratic
It's also largely a question of what change is required? I've seen a parent company move itself to become a subsidiary of a holding company which is now landed in another nation. It had almost no effect on the day to day. It was paper work.
Megacorps are filled with paperwork. But that doesn't necessarily mean they are bad at it, slow at it.
Usually those are in there to be found and used. Your energy would be better spent being upset with the politicians for putting it in there than the lawyers for finding it.
> it is by design
It certainly wasn't "designed" for geographically flexible entities such as Amazon that didn't even exist 30 years ago.
When ever a new kind of entity fits in loop holes that weren't open one technological advance earlier it has any interest to lobby politicians to keep that niche/grey-area open. That can and should be called cheating.
Lobbying is at least transparent in its intentions.
We do not consider that bribery, yet when a group we dislike does the same thing, we’re supposed to see all lobbying as bribery or just that of opposing groups?
<Edited to add brevity.>