I've taken to calling it anti-American (or anti-whatever country in which they're minimizing their taxes). How better to tell the world that you don't care about the societies that made your success possible than to refuse to help fund them?
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-vs-health...
And that's precisely what they do.
The problem doesn't sit at the companies.
When a company plans their tax they can either use the laws as they're intended (tax planning), they can deceive the tax authorities in order to illegally reduce their tax burden (tax evasion) or they can use the laws in ways which aren't necessarily intended, but which aren't yet outright illegal because we haven't had a court ruling yet (tax avoidance).
It's really easy to say "just change the law", but there are problems with that.
Prosecuting complex tax cases is fantastically expensive, and so tax authorities tend to only go to court when i) the case is obvious and ii) everything else has failed. (This includes for the small guy too -- if I chose not to pay my tax there are escalating steps of intervention before I get prosecuted). This means we simply don't know if a particular tax avoidance scheme is illegal or not, and we're unlikely to find out unless the tax authorities move to a more punitive regime.
And we don't necessarily want to give more power to the state. We want to limit the power of the state to some extent, which is why a lot of pretty unpleasant behaviours are perfectly legal, and it's why we impose that "beyond all reasonable doubt" requirement on criminal conviction.
Corporate values aren't (at least they shouldn't be) nonsense. A company could say "we do this because it's legally mandated and we don't have a choice", but that's the worst reason for doing something. Companies that make use of education, transport infrastructure, policing, healthcare, (all the things that are paid for by taxation) should pay their fair amount of tax, rather than using the law in weird unexpected ways to reduce their tax burden by an unreasonable amount.
There is a cultural thing going on here. No-one in the UK is saying that companies should go out of their way to pay more tax than they need to. And reducing their tax burden a bit is probably seen as okay. But we do have the concept of "taking the piss", and a lot of these companies are taking the piss. They need to realise that public tolerance for this is low and reducing, and that if they don't change their behaviours they're going to see increased tax regulation.
1. Politicians are responsible for the laws.
2. Companies are responsible for following the laws.
If you have a beef with any of the above, address the right parties. How they interact and depend on each other is a fact, but also it's not relevant to the above two points. Everyone has a clear responsibility.
Furthermore the phrase "dodged taxes" means "they structured their revenue so they paid less taxes than if they would structure it otherwise". Who the hell says you gotta structure your revenue in order to MAXIMIZE your taxes?
Do you do that? If not, you also "dodge taxes" as far as the media is concerned.
In theory all the power for determining laws is supposed to lie in the hands of the politicians, but in practice a significant fraction of the power lies in the hands of corporations. So it doesn’t make sense to only look at part of the power structure that has set the system up this way.
I don't think it's about rules ("gotta"), it's about ethics. I wouldn't say that maximizing taxes is anything, but the desire to minimize taxes is definitely anti-social.
When deciding if your tax minimization strategy is a good thing simply ask yourself what would happen if everyone found a way to pay virtually nothing. The obvious thing in that scenario is that society collapses. This is obviously not a good thing.
Clearly everyone should try to pay a reasonable share. When your strategy is clearly a contrived misuse of an overly complicated tax code that goes against the spirit if not the letter of the law you should be able to figure out what side of the moral line you are on.
That isn't clear to me, because using the government to collect revenue hasn't been demonstrated to be a benefit. This still presupposes that government revenue is inherently beneficial.
I think if everyone found a way to pay virtually nothing, the government would collapse. That's not the same thing as society collapsing, society and the government are not coterminous.
Tax revenues don't go to "society", they go to the government. It is a logical leap to assume a collapse of society when the government loses funding.
The entirety of the population is doing business in dollars that would end up worth nothing which means everything grinds to a halt while people figure out how to reorganize this brave new world. Right now you own what you own courtesy of the government providing armed men to keep others from taking it and courts to settle differences.
This reorganization would inevitably mean that different groups compete to be the new powers that be. The obvious inheritors would be the existing state power structures which controls lots of armed men and women but nothing is stopping people from setting up their own feifdoms and disagreements about who controls what could trivially have to be settled by shooting each other.
It's not like we don't have plenty of examples of failed states collapsing. Look at Yugoslavia for example. Can you provide me with some counterexamples?