As a solo indiehacker in Europe, its crazy that I have to be so worried about VAT related things and big tech just goes around the whole thing and doesn't even expect to be charged just fined
Businesses who get into trouble because of taxes are doing it intentionally. Or somebody in the company does it intentionally.
That’s ok for the big players with deep pockets. For the little guy this is a much bigger problem. As it should. It would just be nice if law breaking would be a bigger problem for the bigger companies too.
I misfiled stuff a few times and got fined, it's annoying but it's not something that will break your bank.
The behaviour of the tax office varies quite a lot from country to country tho.
But don't trust me, ask your lawyer.
New Zealand. The Accident Compensation Corporation, a compulsory insurance scheme, is absolutely feral. Will crush you "because rules" without a thought.
Many an varied
I was once charged $1200 for income of $600
Within the rules, could've easily bankrupted me
Each time I got a piece of mail asking my to call the IRS to clear it up, and every time the agent was nice and very helpful clearing it up, and not fined.
The reason executives commonly avoid such penalties is because they avoid being found personally liable by claiming they didn't known, did misunderstood the situation, where deceived by others etc.
Through it should be noted that this case is a bit unusual and complicated. The tax dispute itself isn't as simple as Amazone directly having avoided paying their own taxes. And the case of missing taxes has already been settled. This new current investigations are criminal investigation (i.e. the failure of paying taxes is assumed to have been intentional instead of a booking error) and seem to be more targeting executives for having committed crimes (instead of targeting Amazone the company).
Or in other words, Italian prosecutors are feed up US companies not caring for EU law and no one being hold liable.
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(1): Without option to have it replaced with long time parole.
In the US, Section 302 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act exists literally to avoid this: the CEO and CFO have to personally sign filings so they cannot "not know" about financial disclosure content and have plausible deniability. While it only applies to public companies, the model seems reasonable to solve this case too.
But this comes back to how thinks always tend to be more complicate then "clean cut direct tax avoidance".
E.g. here the case isn't as simple as Amazone directly avoiding tax. But them instead to quote:
> Amazon's algorithm and operating models enabled the sale in Italy of goods from tens of thousands of non‑EU sellers - mostly Chinese - without disclosing their identity, helping them avoid paying value‑added tax (VAT)
I.e. Amazon is seen responsible for acting with sever levels of negligence with suspicion of intentionally enabling/supporting tax evasion to profit from it. (And honestly given the level of fraudulent-looking things Amazone allows vendors since a very long time, there is likely some truth to the "intentional supporting malicious actions" part.).
And in turn executives don't claim exactly "they didn't know". They claim they did know and started actions to fix the issue but it the actions failed so you tried other actions and if asked why no bigger actions are tried they claim it didn't look like it was "that" big of a problem through they now realize that was wrong.
The end effect is still the same they doge responsibility as-if they could just claim they didn't know, just with extra steps. Instead of "didn't know" I probably should have used "they claimed incompetence" (and external factors outside of their control) or similar.
Your entire post comes town to "oversimplified", to frame it generous. To frame it factual: misinformation.
> technically such things exist in many countries, most likely also Italy.
Yeah? Which ones? Quote the sections and then we'll continue ...
but also overlaps with other laws, e.g. wrt. failing to act in due diligence
(other laws) like you are legally required to act with due-diligence, as CFO this inherently means knowing about the finances of the company so even if you claim you didn't know it's not exactly changing anything as not keeping up with your due diligence still makes you as likely
There's o EU wide tax law, so that statement is misleading at best and there's many places where that's false. You're spreading misinformation.
> The reason executives commonly avoid such penalties is because they avoid being found personally liable by claiming they didn't known, did misunderstood the situation, where deceived by others etc.
Misinformation again. This blanket statement in just false. Again, because there is no EU-wide law. It's up to the countries and they handle it very differently.