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More Than 100 Universities and Colleges Included in Offshore Leaks Database
- jayess 9y agoThese "leaks" are annoying. They just give you a page with virtually no information, just a chart showing some connection. Release everything. Don't insult my intelligence by deciding for me what to release.
- Iv 9y agoThis is a lesson they learned from the cablegate: releasing a full stash of data is not going to get the public or even the journalists, interested.
- sacheendra 9y agoI partially agree with the parent. Showing these "connections" without any context and detail is just infuriating and leads to click-bait headlines with no actual purpose served. I don't think they are trying to insult anyone's intelligence though. They are just being careful with the data so that their sources are safe. While safety is important, this reminds me of the story of the boy who cried wolf. If they keep doing this multiple times and there is no substantial info., people will stop paying attention when there is some real info. and demagogues will use this as evidence of fake news.
- ellius 9y agoThe problem is that incorporation documents are frequently only a small part of the story. It does allow you to correlate ownership, but unless you can actually show some kind of money movement into and out of accounts, it is difficult to show evidence of a particular crime.
- tonfa 9y agoLooked at one randomly, looks like some University fund is a shareholder (with over 200 other funds) of a Warburg Pincus fund (a private equity company). I'm not exactly sure how that's a big deal, nothing there implies they avoid taxes or anything. (Maybe the fund they invest in does shady things, but it doesn't look like they have any kind of weird offshore setup)
- ryacko 9y agoIt's hard to divert money when you're incorporated as a non-profit.
- vixen99 9y agoDo you mean evade or avoid? Everyone avoids tax. Currently taxes on property transfers in the UK are 5% on property priced at £925,000 and 10% if priced at £925,001. I guess Joe Nonavoider sets the price at the latter figure?
- zimpenfish 9y ago> Everyone avoids tax. No, not everyone. And not everyone evades or optimises tax either.
- ForHackernews 9y agoMost of these offshore tax shelters are not illegal. It's just shady that wealthy individuals and organizations can stash their millions and billions away from public scrutiny and avoid paying taxes on them. It's particularly egregious in the case of ostensibly not-for-profit educational institutions.
- toyg 9y agoYes and no. These arrangements are often grounds for prosecution once they come to light. Just because moving money from A to B and from B to C is legal, it doesn't mean that going from A to C is still legal. Tax authorities usually struggle to reconstruct the entire chain, so they don't prosecute... until somebody else does the job for them, and then they piggyback.
- Jedd 9y agoThey're not really deciding for you what to release, since you have nothing to release. Is your concern that their interpretation of the source material is inaccurate, or that you're being intentionally misled or occluded? The ICIJ has been around for two decades, and their credibility is robust. I don't think they're likely to be making claims like this without access to substantial evidence.
- jayess 9y agoIt’s not that I distrust them, it’s just that I’m a lawyer, operations, and finance guy. The source documents would be extremely interesting to me. Instead I get a meaningless graph that tells me almost nothing. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in personal experiences with journalists is that they’re just that, journalists. They don’t have expertise in finance, law, or most anything complex. Let the data be open sourced and mined by actual experts.
- justinjlynn 9y agoWhat was that saying... "trust, but verify"; holds more than ever here.
- forapurpose 9y ago> They don’t have expertise in finance, law, or most anything complex. Do you know that? Also, I certainly wouldn't agree that journalism isn't complex.
- dragonwriter 9y agoA journalist without domain expertise or the support of a domain expert without an agenda related to the subject-matter of the reporting is crippled in the same way a programmer without domain expertise or support of a domain expert is; journalism may, itself, be a complex domain (as programming is), but expertise in it does not provide relevant domain expertise in the domain that is the subject of reporting. And it's absolutely the case that most journalists covering complex domains don't have an educational background in the domain, and in most domains the market doesn't really reward development of domain expertise (in political reporting, there's some pressure driving reporters to develop some expertise in electoral politics, but that's kind of exceptional, and isn't reflected in other domains, even the policy end of political reporting.)
- foota 9y agoI think part of the reason they do this is because there's massive amounts of unorganized data. This would make it both difficult for individuals to analyze, and would also pose a privacy risk to people and organizations.
- barney54 9y agoIf transparency is good, then these reporters should be more transparent with the information they have. That's not too much to ask. Doling it out like this isn't very helpful.
- reactor4 9y agooffshore leaks database: https://offshoreleaks.icij.org/ https://offshoreleaks.icij.org/
- asddddd 9y agoThis is the best you get: https://offshoreleaks.icij.org/pages/database https://offshoreleaks.icij.org/pages/database They don't release original documents, but still pretty good.
- rubatuga 9y agoSurprising to see University of Toronto there too. I was expecting only US ones for some reason.
- 0xbear 9y agoWhy was it surprising? https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/nov/05/justin-trudeau-adviser-stephen-bronfman-offshore-paradise-papers https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/nov/05/justin-trudeau-...
- mirimir 9y agoI don't see Caltech or MIT. Interesting.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- jiggunjer 9y agoI don't see Europe. Where are they hiding their money?
- yorwba 9y agoI don't think European universities tend to have large funds that they could evade taxes on, since they are usually funded by taxes.
- toyg 9y agoOxford is represented. In continental Europe, most universities are actually state-run or entirely state-funded, so there is no issue. The industrialist approach to educational institutions is very anglo-saxon.
- bkohlmann 9y agoFor some reason, the top link for Stanford goes directly to the Stanford Marching Bands homepage. A band known more for satirical themes rather than music.
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- icc97 9y agoThe UK's offenders: * Oxford * Cambridge * The University of Law Employee Benefit Trust
- stordoff 9y agoCambridge, FWIW, seems to be mostly individual colleges rather than the University itself. Given the size (and presumably diversity) of their endowment assets[0], I don't find this much of a surprise. [0] e.g. Trinity ~£1bn per https://www.trin.cam.ac.uk/alumni/giving-to-trinity/annual-report/financial-faqs/ https://www.trin.cam.ac.uk/alumni/giving-to-trinity/annual-r..., Gonville and Caius ~£150m per https://www.cai.cam.ac.uk/alumni/campaign-brochure/the-endowment https://www.cai.cam.ac.uk/alumni/campaign-brochure/the-endow...
- icc97 9y agoI'm guessing these are just the ones that got caught. I would be surprised if the London Universities e.g. Imperial, LSE would miss out on doing similar things with their funds.
- ringaroundthetx 9y agoIt is very presumptuous to say offender. Which moral argument do you think they are undermining, and what proof do you have of that? A registered entity in a Caribbean nation is just as benign as a registered entity in a United State.
- sendaikiri 9y ago"Paradise Papers" should be in the title.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Declanomous 9y agoCan someone explain to me why Universities, which are mostly non-taxable entities, would use offshore banking?
- fovc 9y ago"The only time university endowments pay taxes is when they invest in debt-financed financial firms such as private equity funds and hedge funds. These investments are considered a business activity unrelated to their tax-exempt missions."
- Declanomous 9y agoSomehow that part of the article didn't click for me. The NYT article linked in the following sentence does a great job of explaining why they are being taxed if you don't have a finance background.
- ringaroundthetx 9y agoYeah I think ICIJ's outrage-bait here is a swing and a miss. UBIT 40% tax on charities was not created to hit university endowments. This is a reason to use an offshore entity.
- gaius 9y agoUBIT 40% tax on charities was not created to hit university endowments So you're saying we can all simply pick and choose which laws were created with us in mind?
- ringaroundthetx 9y agoobviously you can, not sure what the argument here is.
- bradleyjg 9y agoIn addition to the sibling comment there’s also been some disclosures regarding investments in industries that could plausibly get universities bad press — such as coal mines.
- DoofusOfDeath 9y agoI don't really understand the premise of these articles. If an organization is working within the legal confines of the relevant tax systems, exactly what are they guilty of? Being the best possible stewards of their donations?
- ThomPete 9y agoBecause the legality is set up so that it's only those who have a lot of money who can do this. This is the problem. I am all for not paying more taxes than necessary but it should be the same for everyone not just for the few with money to pay the lawyers and pay the fees.
- DoofusOfDeath 9y agoWouldn't that be an argument against the legislature, or perhaps lobbyists, rather than against the nonprofits stuck with the law?
- hust6 9y agoIt's not a problem to me. If I have spent 30 years loosing blood, sweet and tears to gain advantage in an unfair world, I am going to defend that advantage. Your view is unrealistic because you don't want that advantage, forget about doing anything to get it, and pretend people who have the advantage can be tamed. Like turning lions into deer. Never going to happen.
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- d--b 9y agoAt this stage it's the companies that don't do offshore tax avoidance that deserve front page news...
- seanmccann 9y agoYou can incorporate in Delaware to allow shareholders from any US state avoid double taxation. You incorporate (mostly funds) in zero tax countries to allow worldwide investors avoid double taxation. A shareholder of an "offshore" corporation often still pays the taxes in their home country. There's certainly a lot of abuse, but there are valid reasons to own offshore stock.
- hippich 9y ago"You can incorporate in Delaware to allow shareholders from any US state avoid double taxation" - could you please expand on it? Are you talking about corporate tax + dividends tax, or about something else when saying "double taxation"?
- xbzbanna 9y agoI'm not the person you are asking, but I think it means a US shareholder in a US company being taxed both by the state the company is incorporated in, and the state the shareholder resides in. There are a lot of state taxes that Delaware doesn't charge at all, or can be avoided. It's almost like Delaware is a discount seller of corporate residency. Charge a low price and make it up on volume. Smart strategy by the states/countries with the political will to do it. If you live in a state where you are taxed on your investment earnings, you might feel "double-taxed" if those earnings were already taxed at the corporate level.
- hippich 9y agoah.. that sounds like tripple-taxing then. 1) Federal Corporate Income Tax, 2) Incorporation state income tax, 3) State of shareholder residency taxing income (and then shareholder spending money to buy things and pay sales tax.. - 4?)
- seanmccann 9y agoFunds with international investors often incorporate in a place like the Caymans. If the fund was incorporated in the US, a UK investor "deal with" US+UK tax, even if they don't visit or do business in the US.
- ickwabe 9y agoThis article provides little context or analysis. This article from the NYTimes provides a better jumping off point on this same topic (colleges and universities mentioned in the paradise papers) and is better at making clear what the potential ethical problems are. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/08/world/universities-offshore-investments.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/08/world/universities-offsho...