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Comment by svnt | Hacker News Reader

Not paying taxes while losing money sounds like fraud to you?

What do you propose should be taxed, exactly?

Cash flow. Profit get's taxed at x%, cash flow that was offset with losses/expenses gets taxed at y% < x. Company that does $100Mil of business and makes no money is very different than company that does $10k of business and makes no money.

Your equations do not account for the difference you mention, they only ensure growth will be slower and riskier.

That's fine, and in exchange we get significantly more tax revenue and close a gaping tax avoidance loophole. If taxing profit was a good proxy for business activity companies would use it when making their pricing tiers. But they don't. They use revenue and headcount because profit can and is gamed. I can't deduct my expenses on my own taxes and the world didn't end.

It’s an interesting point but your argument fails in that you get a standard deduction that probabilistically exceeds the expenses related to your job.

Perhaps it would need to be something like x%revenue above $10M, y%revenue above 1B beginning after three years of operation.

True, non-profits don't pay taxes on any revenue regardless of expense.

How do you know they had no profit with all of the deals with major companies and having one of the most popular software services in existence? Non-profits can earn profit, they just don't have to pay taxes on those profits and they can't distribute those profits to stakeholders -- it goes back to the business.

They are also a private company, and do not have to report revenue, expenses, or profits.

So yeah, I stand by what I said -- it sounds like fraud. And it deserves an audit.

> How do you know they had no profit with all of the deals with major companies and having one of the most popular software services in existence?

By reading their Form 990 filings, which are publicly accessible here: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/810....

To be fair, this is a year and a half out of date (finances ending Dec 2022). The first chatGPT had only just come out at that point. 2023 fiscal report is due by Nov 15, and we won't know until next Nov about 2024. So yeah, an audit is in order, to bring the records up to date before the switch, if nothing else.

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