Hacker News Reader

Comment by GDC7 | Hacker News Reader

Misleading title, it's just for large multinationals.

There will be a revenue treshold of 890$ million

This is good news for startups! Cancel that, this is good news for the vast majority of unicorns as well.

It's still early because we have to wait and see what the loophole seekers are gonna find, but in any event, as it stands it looks like a good development for startups and VCs.

Loophole seekers are disgusting and dumb, they engineer solutions that save billions in taxes for multinationals but aren't paid proportionally. A genius in the transfer pricing dept. at one of the big 4 makes like an above average lawyer in NYC or LA.

They are more instrumental to the public company profits than the CEO in many instances.

View on HN

I just hope the 750 million euro limit doesn't suddenly vanish "somewhere along the line" because "countries couldn't agree" and we end up with the whole Digital VAT Directive circus all over again - that is to say, that this minimal tax starts applying to small businesses it was never meant to apply to.

You mean raised? If they remove it then it means everbody has to pay it

No, I mean removed so that everybody has to pay it. I'm just hoping they won't get to pull similar shenanigans this time since this is a global agreement.

what will prevent an multinational to make dozens or hundreds of subsidiary with each having revenue threshold of $890 million ?

Oh wow! You found that ONE TRICK that governments HATE. Somehow thousands of legislators and economists around the world never, ever thought of that and are going to be completely fooled by a company that structures its revenues in this fashion. I am absolutely sure that will work...

Do you believe that "loopholes" exist?

I hope it means that there will be dozens or hundreds of additional CEOs.

Public companies can't do that, unless they want to have at least as many tickers.

The 890 million treshold is calculated for the holding, not the subsidiaries

Pretty sure you can create an index fund filled with all your sub 750M subsidiaries, redistribute the money that was gained by selling those and voila. You can even mix and match. Of course this is no cheap thing to materialise given that the law will probably be against such a thing but I’d give it a years time before the first ones raise their head with this approach.

The cynic in me says it wouldn't have been agreed on if the loopholes weren't already baked in.

Nothing cynical, it's lobbying 101.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com