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> There's a growing resistance to the Netherlands as a "Doorsluisland", and our current administration's political turmoil will hopefully provide the momentum f

> There's a growing resistance to the Netherlands as a "Doorsluisland", and our current administration's political turmoil will hopefully provide the momentum for actual change - so hopefully things will change. I am really not holding my breath for this. I am glad to see the awareness of tax avoidance (through postbusfirmas, 'double Irish with a Dutch sandwich', etc.) growing, yet until we do something about the root cause, all 'systemic solutions' proposed by the bourgeois political system will still be like proposing to cure a heart attack with a band aid (the heart attack here being mass exploitation by global capitalism [1]: exacerbated by climate change and impending civilizational collapse). [1] Zak Cope, https://anti-imperialism.org/2012/09/18/understanding-and-changing-an-interview-with-zak-cope-author-of-divided-world-divided-class/ https://anti-imperialism.org/2012/09/18/understanding-and-ch...

emn13 5y ago
Because profits are easily gamed (e.g. via loans and IP licenses), the double Irish with a dutch sandwich depended not only on shifting profits (the dutch sandwich part) but also on a low-tax EU state (the double irish part, though that also involved bermuda iirc). However, the loophole in Irish tax law was closed in 2015, and came fully into effect in 2020. But the underlying problem still exists - after all, profit shifting isn't some tax loophole; it's an intrinsic possibility given IP law and intangible assets. I'm skeptical this is ever going to disappear - because how are you going to tell a legitimate low-margin firm that merely has high costs in the form of IP licenses and loan interest from a shell company that's engineered those costs to cancel out any income, such that all profit accrues to whoever holds that IP or granted the loan? These tax avoidance techniques thus aren't really complex, and aren't trivial to solve - as long as you can shift profits into some jurisdiction with low or no taxes, but even more trivially simply by investing rather than making profits - resulting in lower-tax capital gains rather than income tax. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_Sandwich https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_Sandwich https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/06/world/apple-taxes-jersey.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/06/world/apple-taxes-jersey.... But even without outright tax havens like Jersey, profit shifting is a problem, because it encourages states to do a race to the bottom. Personally, I think this game is lost; we should switch to taxing revenue and giving up on this profit-shifting whackamole; e.g. by much higher VATs instead.

emn13 5y ago

Because profits are easily gamed (e.g. via loans and IP licenses), the double Irish with a dutch sandwich depended not only on shifting profits (the dutch sandwich part) but also on a low-tax EU state (the double irish part, though that also involved bermuda iirc). However, the loophole in Irish tax law was closed in 2015, and came fully into effect in 2020. But the underlying problem still exists - after all, profit shifting isn't some tax loophole; it's an intrinsic possibility given IP law and intangible assets. I'm skeptical this is ever going to disappear - because how are you going to tell a legitimate low-margin firm that merely has high costs in the form of IP licenses and loan interest from a shell company that's engineered those costs to cancel out any income, such that all profit accrues to whoever holds that IP or granted the loan? These tax avoidance techniques thus aren't really complex, and aren't trivial to solve - as long as you can shift profits into some jurisdiction with low or no taxes, but even more trivially simply by investing rather than making profits - resulting in lower-tax capital gains rather than income tax. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_Sandwich https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_Sandwich https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/06/world/apple-taxes-jersey.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/06/world/apple-taxes-jersey.... But even without outright tax havens like Jersey, profit shifting is a problem, because it encourages states to do a race to the bottom. Personally, I think this game is lost; we should switch to taxing revenue and giving up on this profit-shifting whackamole; e.g. by much higher VATs instead.