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Comment by rektide | Hacker News Reader

Deliberate allowances are created but big companies can hire legions of lawyers to reduce their tax burden, to find all sorts of minutia & excuses & readings of words to take advantage of every subclause they can. The aggregate effect feels enormously poisonous, totally toxic. Mega corporations can adapt far faster than anyone or anything else, including those charged with governing & regulating.

Good governance is hard. And megacorps are an advanced persistent threat that goes to great lengths to claim exceptions for itself.

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It only takes one clever accountant to find a loophole. The right fix is to simplify the tax code.

Guess why most billionaires favor political parties that agitate against simplifying the tax code...

"find all sorts of minutia & excuses"

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.

there's a lot of sense to this, but I still continue to believe a lot of very good incentives & governance exist, that help small & medium folk, that intend well. I'm not in favor of giving up & u regulating; when systems benefits are dominated by the big, it's time to re-regulate, try to alter the ellegible beneficiaries.

Absolutely, the solution is better laws and regulations.

> Mega corporations can adapt far faster than anyone or anything else

i really don't think this is true, many big companies are hopelessly bureaucratic

I hugely agree with your sentiment. But I think this case still stands. As opposed to the human "resources" that do the work, which management feels it must direct & organize & lead & regulate, the financial department often speaks the same business school language, is already aligned to the board-level/business-school goals of raking in barrels & barrels of money.

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.

Compared the government? How long did it take to fix the tax law for the Dutch Sandwich or whatever it’s called. A decade?

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