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Comment by cfst | Hacker News Reader

Regarding the IMF report, is it actually harder to hide wealth than income, or is it that there are so few global taxes on wealth that nobody's currently bothering to hide it? It seems like income, being a continuous series of transactions, would be the more difficult of the two.

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Fun fact: when there was meaningful data on Ukraine, it was number 1 in the world by wealth inequality and at the same time had the best score at income equality.

Likelt has to do with not having any property or wealth taxes, but having modest incone taxes that were rigorosly collected

I think it varies - each are easier/harder to hide in different ways at different scales. It's the "convicting Al Capone for tax evasion" thing. They didn't need to prove where his income came from, they could just show that his wealth was clearly higher than his declared income could have possibly yielded.

I bet that both are fairly easy to hide, but some forms aren't. It's hard to hide when money arrives in your bank account and it's hard to hide that you own 51% of Tesla shares. You can do either one of those through a proxy however, which makes it harder to track down, not impossible (why does 51% of Tesla shareholding always agree with this guy? Why's he shilling Offshore Panama Corp LLC products so hard?)

Revenue transactions and taxable income are two very different topics.

Your accountant can clarify the difference.

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