Dutch companies pledge to not avoid taxes | Hacker News Reader

Dutch companies pledge to not avoid taxes

nltimes.nl

17 pointsbelter7 comments

Funny enough not shell because its not a Dutch company anymore

> Over 40 Dutch multinationals and other large companies pledged to no longer avoid or evade taxes by singing the Tax Governance Code drafted by entrepreneurs' organization VNO-NCW

As long as they're singing they must be happy about it!

That's too bad. If the government wants to incentivize investment in certain geographical areas, they may offer tax breaks for businesses there. I guess those Dutch companies won't move there, since that would avoid taxes. Or if the government wants to encourage companies to provide certain benefits to employees (eg. if this was the US then tax exempt pension plans), then those companies won't take advantage of it.

Of course, this could just be virtue signaling, in which case I guess Dutch companies will be taking advantage of those legal tax avoiding methods.

". . . they regarded tax payment as a duty and promised not to use constructions and tax havens to avoid doing that duty, . . . ."

Why not simply outlaw tax havens?

It's hard to write laws to outlaw them. I mean you can't really outlaw a company shuffling money around to meet their business needs. You also can't write laws governing another country.

So unless there's a big international effort to get all countries to adopt some consistent tax laws, and cut off trade with the ones who don't sign on, there will be some countries who profit from keeping their laws favorable to being tax havens.

Nah, why bother? The honor system and money are a totally compatible combination /s

I'm so embarrassed about how my country deals with these things.

The problem is that "normal international business needs" looks exactly the same as overseas tax havens.

Say you want to sell products overseas: well simply operating in your home country isn't sufficient - you MUST have a corporation in every overseas location where you are doing business. And their books have to be separate from your home country because of local and foreign laws. Despite this fact, a lot of people claim this is a "tax haven" structure - it's not; it's legally and practically required.

The only way to 100% avoid "tax havens" is to BAN all transnational operations and international business. Basically role back globalism to an era BEFORE all international travel and business. And even then, that probably won't change things - I only need to have an overseas friend operate the business for me based on contracts or personal relationships. The same result but completely "underground", out of view and undetectable then.

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