From your comment, shell companies look like some magical protective gear.
Are they that expensive to set up? I think a discerning commoner could consider doing so if the amount of money is enough to certainly trigger AML.
Are they that expensive to set up? I think a discerning commoner could consider doing so if the amount of money is enough to certainly trigger AML.
It depends.
Usually it isn't the shell company itself per se that is expensive, it is the professional advice to use it to achieve your desired ends that you pay the big bucks for.
That said, a run of the mill offshore company in <insert-island-banking-nation-here> runs around $3-5K USD per year in various administrative and filing fees, depending upon your specifics.
Slightly less for a US shell company.
However. In order to avail yourself of advice for various tax minimization tactics and strategies, and have those tax attorneys nearly indemnify you when the IRS comes a-knockin'...now you're talking percentages of AUM. It isn't the specific consultation fees, though those are fairly healthy. These consultants won't really materially help you when the IRS audits you unless you have been running your entire bookkeeping and CPA book of business through them the entire time. Those fees rack up quickly over the years.
Once I worked out their business model and the numbers, it suddenly made sense why the fancy tax minimization strategies were commonly employed only by large companies hiring these folks, large companies with in-house teams like this, or count-the-commas-club UHNWI's. The strategies they shared with me were clever, years later I independently confirmed they would have worked, but I don't have nearly enough FCF to sanely justify using them.
You've also got to have enough money that any tax authority looking at you decides you'd be an expensive target, so they won't try it unless they're sure it's a slam-dunk.
I always had thought that the idea of shell companies is that there is a long chain, or even DAG, of companies that own basically nothing but obligations of other such companies, and the structure is large enough that tracing it back to the original masters and beneficiaries becomes infeasible.
If running a typical no-op LLC is $200-300 a year, running 30 of them is $6-9k, not an entirely trivial amount but quite feasible for anyone interested to hide even mere $200-300k of illicit activities, like selling a moderate-size home.
No we can’t. Their clients would drop them with prejudice if they even suggested serving commoners.