29 ms·

That would be way too easy to take advantage of by a big company making lots of small side companies

by belinder 7y ago

ThomPete 7y ago
How would that work out in practice? Sounds highly unlikely.
- MiroF 7y ago
  Have you heard of contracting practices in the US? Rather than "highly unlikely", this is the norm for tech companies that want to skirt corporate responsibility.
  - AnthonyMouse 7y ago
    That's an unrelated issue. In this context that could be avoided simply by counting more than half time individual contractors as employees when measuring entity size.
- IshKebab 7y ago
  Splitting large companies into smaller ones to get tax breaks and other incentives is extremely common. For example in the UK there are tax breaks for companies that spend more than a certain percentage of the revenue on research. Just below the threshold? Simple! Split out a research arm!
  - AnthonyMouse 7y ago
    This is common because splitting a large company into five or six smaller ones is feasible, since the overhead of doing so is much smaller than even the smaller entity size. Setting the threshold such that a company the size of Google would have to split their operations into thousands of individual corporations would be a lot less feasible. You could also avoid the issue by limiting the exemption to corporations not owned in any part by a corporation that wouldn't itself qualify for the exemption, since the point of the exemption is to help real small entities and not subsidiaries of huge publicly traded corporations.
VonGallifrey 7y ago
I worked for a company that was structured like that. Basically I worked for a very small company that was in the same offices as several other similar sized companies. All those companies where on the same network and there was no distinction of who was working for which company. They all just mixed together. No one really cared who you work for anyway since it was all owned by the same 3 people and it behaved like a single large company. Technically though it was just lots of small companies as far as the Government was concerned.
Mirioron 7y ago
You could just add a good faith clause that forbids it.

That would be way too easy to take advantage of by a big company making lots of small side companies

ThomPete 7y ago

How would that work out in practice? Sounds highly unlikely.

MiroF 7y ago
Have you heard of contracting practices in the US? Rather than "highly unlikely", this is the norm for tech companies that want to skirt corporate responsibility.
- AnthonyMouse 7y ago
  That's an unrelated issue. In this context that could be avoided simply by counting more than half time individual contractors as employees when measuring entity size.
IshKebab 7y ago
Splitting large companies into smaller ones to get tax breaks and other incentives is extremely common. For example in the UK there are tax breaks for companies that spend more than a certain percentage of the revenue on research. Just below the threshold? Simple! Split out a research arm!
- AnthonyMouse 7y ago
  This is common because splitting a large company into five or six smaller ones is feasible, since the overhead of doing so is much smaller than even the smaller entity size. Setting the threshold such that a company the size of Google would have to split their operations into thousands of individual corporations would be a lot less feasible. You could also avoid the issue by limiting the exemption to corporations not owned in any part by a corporation that wouldn't itself qualify for the exemption, since the point of the exemption is to help real small entities and not subsidiaries of huge publicly traded corporations.

VonGallifrey 7y ago

I worked for a company that was structured like that. Basically I worked for a very small company that was in the same offices as several other similar sized companies. All those companies where on the same network and there was no distinction of who was working for which company. They all just mixed together. No one really cared who you work for anyway since it was all owned by the same 3 people and it behaved like a single large company. Technically though it was just lots of small companies as far as the Government was concerned.

Mirioron 7y ago

You could just add a good faith clause that forbids it.