Wealthy Americans Targeted by U.S. in Panama Tax-Fraud Probe
bermudapost.com
bermudapost.com
To my knowledge, Bermuda Post is not a real journalistic organization in Bermuda (the major paper is the Royal Gazette). Instead, checking their about page reveals:
'BermudaPost is a non-profit, private and self-funded, commonly-created News and info-sharing platform that enables everybody to share valuable content such as local and global news updates.'
Besides two suspiciously barebones property listings, there are no references to Bermuda.
> It's not in the same OMGWTF category as newsmax or OAN despite what some HN people will tell you.
Drudge has a history chock full of conspiracy theories, retractions and dirty-deletes. All of which center around attacking liberal politicians or causes to "own" or "gotcha" them.
Seriously, read the list that includes Obama birther conspiracies, Las Vegas shooting conspiracies, "immigrants setting wildfires" conspiracies (from Breitbart), and perpetuating hoaxes like "black man attacked McCain campaign staffer!": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drudge_Report
If it was done well and became popular it might cut down on clickbait and the tons of trash that is pushed out as truth but isn't.
As an aside, HN is usually pretty good about switching the link for something better when prompted.
The URL can always be changed if there's a better source. Just email them.
In the old days, the rich would have to hire their own small defense/army just to protect their riches from being stolen. And we're not even talking about the public road/education/health/communications system that allows their products to be made and delivered to customers that pay the money that becomes their profits.
From the above you can see that the these people want to "ride free" off the backs of people that pay their share back into the system.
It should be treason.
For you as an individual you have to realize that the state doesn't know who your lawyers are. They might know you have A lawyer, they don't know all the lawyers you have. Piercing a lawyer's records is more expensive for the government to both rationalize and do and use as evidence, and just adds another layer for them to just stick with focusing on the lower hanging fruit.
This is more about avoiding scrutiny just because some other business got subpoena'd, actually report/pay your taxes though. There are other ways to shield assets and compliantly reduce taxes domestically.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/worlds-biggest-private-tax-...
Panama is the 15th.
All states, the district, the territories, and even reservations have incorporation laws. The reservations are very numerous and many have not even considered the possibility, just show up and ask them to pass your model incorporation law. This is the kind of opportunity that the US still has. (There are many jurisdictions that have passed good laws, but have incompetent and ill equipped executive branches. If nobody has ever shown up to form their super awesome business type, the public servants in the state might not actually know how to do it. Whereas places with validation like Wyoming and Delaware, can have turn around times of 24 hours for things they do often.)
The other way that the US is somewhat unique, in comparison to other countries, is that there is no way to incorporate a business at the national level. Only Congress can create corporations, one at a time, one law at a time, and Congress has never addressed or delegated this to change this reality. The national government derives its power from the states and has never bothered them over this. (They did recently pass some registry of business owners law though, but it's more of a feel good thing for activists than anything practical.)
The beauty of this is that the US has an easier time pointing its bullying efforts outwards, whereas all US jurisdictions escape scrutiny by the US or OECD or other multinational bodies that put "tax havens" on blacklists.
States compete for business, so this makes more and more favorable business incorporation laws pretty easy to get.
The last thing I'll say is that there are other countries similar to the structure of the US, where there are many obscure states you can actually create business entities in. Some countries have incorporation at the national and the state level, just because the separate jurisdictions passed the laws. Some countries you might not even notice are federations of smaller states. So again, its all about reading comprehension. The usefulness of this knowledge is that some countries brands might attract scrutiny now (ie. "Panama corporation"), while the state level version is completely benign to everyone because they just haven't seen the name and aren't allergic to it.
To look up corporate records, you need to apply and get approval, pay $100 and some additional amount per record. Then it is an ancient batch CGI web app that gets you results some days later.
I've been meaning to build a corporate transparency site/non-profit. Some low price per record, but then the results are public on the site for anybody else that is interested.
Well, between Delaware and Nevada there are lots of unscrutinized jurisdictions...
The worldwide reality is a many-to-many relationship. Switzerland doesn't snitch on other country's citizens for two reasons:
1) Other countries don't have the resources to enforce a global tax regime. And if they tried, their diplomatic leverage was so weak that it was laughed at.
2) Other countries never even attempted to pass laws for a global tax regime, that is an almost uniquely American hubris, and even with the US's massive resources it also struggles to enforce this stretch of the jurisdiction concept.
That is wrong, see AEOI/CRS as mentioned above. Switzerland exchanges information with dozens of countries and has been doing so since 2017.
And strictly speaking, it's not about citizship, but tax residency. A Danish national living in France will have their Swiss bank account reported to France, not Denmark.
oh that's new to me!
didn't know OECD had actually gotten anywhere beyond blacklists.
I've seen CRS in a variety of countries, many of those are still implemented in interesting ways, and also don't mean there is liability or tax liability for the ultimate owners.
1: https://www.oecd.org/tax/automatic-exchange/crs-implementati...
Or, do they?
>So if an us person open an account, they send all information about it to the us. I think this is at least since 15 .. 20 years now.
And what if a person opens an account under this and that scheme, that ends up sending only irrelevant information about some mediator?
The IRS doesn't care what you do with post-tax money! There is no prohibition on doing stuff outside the country, there are no capital controls for US citizens.
The main difference is the secrecy and lack of scrutiny. Even if you have judgement proof trusts and retirement plans like Roth IRAs, people still get to know about them. And they have withdrawal restrictions.
So there is utility in disappearing some of the money that you already paid taxes on into a better jurisdiction for that purpose. The key point is already paid taxes on.
Example of utility being when you get charged with something and you get your assets frozen so you can't even pay a lawyer making it difficult to afford your rights as a US citizen. Well, now you can lol because you were still liquid. There are other ways to do it too, this is one way. It takes a pretty weird and creepy level of nationalist hubris to think your money needs to stay in the country, but I would say this brainwashing has been largely successful in creating a stigma at least. Except to people that matter.
Pay your taxes though.
In the old days, the rich would have to hire their own small defense/army just to protect their riches from being stolen. And we're not even talking about the public road/education/health/communications system that allows their products to be made and delivered to customers that pay the money that becomes their profits.
From the above you can see that the these people want to "ride free" off the backs of people that pay their share back into the system.
It should be treason.
You also might be surprised how little of the US’ tax revenue is used to support that infrastructure.
This is why it would never constitute treason, while remaining a potential criminal charge.
An efficient (not wasteful, which is tough to make happen) investment in either would help the US in every way, publically and privately.
No, the IRS absolutely does care what you do with your money abroad.
If you create a foreign bank account (anywhere) they literally require said foreign bank to send a report every year of your assets. And the bank always complies, because the US treasury can restrict its ability to transact in US dollars.
Also, as an American, having a foreign investment account is possibly the dumbest thing you can do. There’s extremely punitive taxes on foreign controlled investment accounts to the point it doesn’t make sense to hold any money abroad.
Your advice may have been true pre-2000s but it is no longer the case in a post-FATCA world.
Yes, a report is sent by the bank
No, that has nothing to do with there being a problem or any liability for you. A report goes out to the IRS, so what. Was your main point to say "and therefore the IRS cares?" okay. It means nothing to them if there is no tax event.
Less budget for the state or government means less redistribution and less public services, meaning the poor becomes poorer.
What's crazy is that as a european, would I talk about taxes on hacker news or reddit, I will always encounter libertarians who are arguing that taxes are bad.
https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/gmaps.jsp?indexToShow=...
The problem is the Pickety/Zucman analysis didn't fully take into account taxes and transfers, so it overestimated 1%-er incomes and underestimated low wage earner benefits. Within the US, CHIP and Medicaid expansion have made a huge difference. After all it's hard to argue Medicaid expansion has no effect on inequality.
Another major area of anomaly is that the P/Z analysis assumed income from pass-through businesses was capital gains. It turns out, this includes a lot of doctors, lawyers, etc whose income comes form these kinds of business structures. That made it look like their income was capital gains from investments in businesses, where in fact it's really labour income. This is not a small discrepancy, there are a lot of these sorts of people and they earn a lot. Correct for these sorts of things and the inequality largely evaporates.
Anyway, it's a messy problem with a million details and there are still distortions in the economy that disproportionately benefit the wealthy and always have done.
I disagree tax evasion is such a big factor, it's a problem but a relatively constant one. I think the main problems are mostly structural distortions in the tax system that encourage passive incomes. Income from rents and inheritance are significant issues. The drastic rise in property prices across the developed world is a huge problem that disproportionately hurts low income groups.
Where do you get this from? It’s quite dismissive, given the large amount of study about wealth inequality increasing globally. This is definitely an issue throughout Europe too and even Asia, in my experience.
That's one reason the Obama era health care reforms are so significant, it doesn't show up as a headline economic or wealth figure and now it's just become the new normal, but taking health care provision off the table as a critical risk for tens of millions of low income Americans was a huge game changer. More of that please.
I don't have figures for the top 1% in Europe, but for the top 10% it's gone up by a few percent (except Eastern Europe which is much higher). The World Inequality Lab at the Paris School or Economics published a report on this in 2020.
https://wid.world/document/bcg2019-full-paper/
Inequality in Asia, particularly China is definitely up but then it's just gone through a massive program of industrialisation. There's little point comparing inequality in China now to what it was in the 1970s. What would you even be measuring? Similarly for Eastern Europe, their whole economic system has changed so you're not comparing like for like.
Before you say they will spend the USD. That's the point. It's like dodging CO2 taxes by not emitting CO2. You haven't cheated the system.