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Netflix Europe offices raided in tax fraud probe
- orangepanda 2y agoIs a mini-series about this already greenlit?
- 23B1 2y agoyes but it was cancelled after becoming too popular
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- diggan 2y agoThe meat: > Last year, French media outlet La Lettre reported that until 2021, Netflix in France minimised its tax payments by declaring its turnover generated in France to the Netherlands. > investigators are trying to determine whether Netflix continued to attempt to minimise its profits after 2021. Wasn't Uber or some other US company found doing something similar? First they were found to be in violation of some law/dodging taxes, said they'd fix it and later found to not have done anything about it? Is that behavior perhaps more accepted in the US than Europe?
- kbolino 2y agoIt's hard to accurately measure secretive crimes like this, but the estimates seem to put corporate tax evasion by percentage of GDP at either similar levels between the EU and US or actually higher in the EU.
- kranke155 2y agoThe EU is just as corporatist as the US. The corporations just aren’t as big, but they control their local/national politics effectively.
- yunohn 2y agoLiterally every single company that can afford to setup things like tax transfer schemes, are actively evading taxes. It’s mind boggling how widespread it is, how accepted (legal) it is, and how it will seemingly never be fixed. https://www.somo.nl/the-netherlands-still-a-tax-haven/ https://www.somo.nl/the-netherlands-still-a-tax-haven/
- diggan 2y ago> Literally every single company that can afford to setup these tax transfer schemes, are actively evading taxes. Yeah, but I think that's different than what happened in this case with Netflix. Declaring earnings from one country in another country is not just "tax optimizations" but straight up illegal. It's not using/abusing legal loopholes like most larger companies do, but going against the law.
- yunohn 2y agoHonestly, I’m not sure. I find the premise of such tax laws to be illogical at a basic level. There are apparently always multiple ways to create legal loopholes. If we consider the Irish sandwich mechanism that was recently “stopped”, somehow that hasn’t materially affected any of the innumerable companies that were using it. As we saw in the Apple vs EU case, most practices might’ve never been actually legal either. So my personal opinion is that (almost) all tax “optimization” is at the minimum immoral, but most likely illegal too. Edit: This reminds me of the idea of temporarily embarrassed millionaires. Your personal optimization is not what I’m talking about - corporations have legal teams the size of SMBs lobbying/creating/looking for secret loopholes, and people are talking about public self service methods.
- salawat 2y agoIt isn't really accepted anywhere, but there is a group of people who will make it their goal in life to get up to any shady practice to try to shortchange or dodge their local host polity to their ultimate advantage. The tax dodge, if you will, becomes something of a pass time and point of pride for them. This becomes more difficult as more tax authorities better integrate with one another, which admittedly, is something many in in the U.S. fidget over, even if it is realized that the need for it is almost entirely a byproduct of these types of people's actions that necessitate that happening.
- marcinzm 2y agoGiven Wirecard I wouldn’t assume the EU equally prosecutes or tracks crimes for EU and non-EU companies.
- DanielHB 2y agoThey obviously target the companies the highest revenues. Also you would be suprised. For example Klarna, a Swedish company, is often in trouble with the Swedish tax authorities. A few years ago they had to pay huge amounts of money to the Swedish government because of some tax-dodging loophole was deemed illegal by court-order. So Klarna went into a desperate attempt to last-minute cut costs to not tank the stock value due to much lower expected returns that quarter. It was kinda funny because the employees of Klarna are unionized they couldn't just fire anyone on short notice like that, but they did let go pretty much all consultants in one swoop. If this was the US the CEO would have just fired a bunch of people because the CFO f-ed up. For a few months there was a major glut of former-Klarna consultants around in Stockholm, two of them ended up at my company at the time. I couldn't find details about this tax dodging online (it was around 5 years ago), but here is another article about Klarna being in trouble over GDPR violations: https://www.reuters.com/technology/swedens-klarna-fined-733000-over-data-protection-shortcomings-2024-03-11/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/swedens-klarna-fined-7330...
- Hamuko 2y agoIsn't the Wirecard case still pending with execs in jail waiting for trial?
- marcinzm 2y agoOnly after it all imploded did the government go after them. Until that moment it did the exact opposite including opening criminal investigations into the journalists calling it a scam.
- lifestyleguru 2y agoThe protagonist was first the apple of Merkel's eye and then vanished in Russia.
- lm28469 2y ago> Wasn't Uber or some other US company found doing something similar? Airbnb, they had to pay like 70k of tax a few years ago. There are employees who pay as much tax as single filers lol They paid 18% less tax in 2016 than in 2013 while the number of flats available on the site went from 30k to 300k https://www.lesechos.fr/2016/08/airbnb-na-paye-que-69168-euros-dimpots-en-france-213253 https://www.lesechos.fr/2016/08/airbnb-na-paye-que-69168-eur...
- scotty79 2y agoAll spending should be taxed instead of income. Income is too easy to move and hide. Spending tax could be unified framework encompassing all financial activity. If you purchase anything, labor, imports, energy, stock, politicians, you should be taxed. Spending is the moment when the money shows its ugly head and does harm.
- thrw42A8N 2y agoRevenue tax? We had that before the fall of the wall - not again please. The VAT system works well and should be used more.
- scotty79 2y agoPurchase tax would work like reverse VAT. Companies could be awarded tax credits for their sales (not 100% though) and pay tax on their purchases. This would be harder to evade and additionally incentivise companies to do more with less which might be good for environmental transition.
- thrw42A8N 2y agoWhy not 100%? How is that even supposed to work in low-margin markets like construction, where the profit is 100x less than the costs, so even 1% tax would erase it? But any markets really, this makes innovation and business so risky that I'd probably close down my IT company too.
- seanhunter 2y agoYeah there's the so called "Dutch Sandwich"[1] which is a well-known tax "planning" methodology that corporates use with the so called "Double Irish" being another one. There's also a slightly less-well known one involving Mauritius and India. They're all ways of moving profits between companies in order to exploit tax treaties that countries put in place. In the case of the Dutch sandwich I think the Netherlands has a treaty with the Netherlands Antilles or something so people have a company in the Netherlands which then shifts things off-shore to the Antilles and avoids tax that way. It's nonsense of course. Companies should (in my opinion) shoulder their fair share of tax because otherwise that burden falls disproportionately on individual income tax. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_Sandwich https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_Sandwich
- s_dev 2y agoYour information is outdated -- Double Irish is no longer applicable according to your own source since 2010.
- yunohn 2y agoNo, it’s much more complicated than that. If you scroll a bit further: > After pressure from the EU,[22] the Double Irish BEPS tool was closed to new users in 2015,[citation needed] however, new Irish BEPS tools were created to replace it:[23][24] Not only do the original evaders get to continue doing it, they’ve also found new loopholes already.
- Muromec 2y agoIt's like eruv. The loophole was planted there for us mortals to find and use it
- seanhunter 2y agoRight. Also I wasn't trying (nor am I equipped) to give some kind of current guide to tax dodging. I was explaining the basic sort of thing people do. The specifics change all the time because there is a sort of whack-a-mole that tax authorities try to play to get people to pay and people pay ever more and more inflated fees to various accountants and tax "planning" experts for ever more byzantine and artificial schemes of one kind or another. My own experience with tax experts has left me pretty jaded about tax advice. It seems to me that often these companies have maybe 1 dude who actually understands tax and an army of people with powerpoint going out selling the "solution". I had a complex tax situation when setting up a business in the UK and US and got tax advice from one of the big four firms not to dodge tax but to make sure I understood the US system correctly and was paying everything I should. I paid so much tax that I got investigated in both the UK and US because they thought there must be some sort of fiddle because I seemed to be paying way more than I sholud be (this was what I told the accountants). I ended up getting rebates from the IRS and from the UK HMRC after the investigations but it took a couple of years to get it all sorted out.
- scotty79 2y agoThat's rich coming from French. Long time ago France Telecom bought Polish top phone network. Immediately rebranded it to Orange (despite the fact that the company had one of the strongest brands on market where it operated). Unsurprisingly the licensing fees for using Orange brand that the Polish company had to pay to France Telecom amounted to large percentage of taxable profits that the Polish company had. Overt theft from Polish company and Polish taxpayers.
- mort96 2y agoNation state acts in its own interest, news at 11 No but seriously, this doesn't sound surprising? Why should France be against a French company buying up other companies and bringing revenue back to France
- scotty79 2y agoDo you want euroscepticism? Because that's how you get euroscepticism.
- mort96 2y agoI don't understand the problem honestly. I'd understand it if Poland stepped in and didn't let the company be bought out, but this just seems like bog standard normal globalized free market stuff? It would be extremely weird for France to step in and prevent a French company from buying a Polish company due to fears of stoking Euroscepticism among the polish population wouldn't it? And I don't even know what this has to do with the EU, companies have been buying up companies from other countries both in and out of the EU forever?
- scotty79 2y agoI also don't expect nothing other from thief then continuing to steal. I also expect thieves to be protective of their own assets. I'm just saying they are still thieves and any outrage in their name is misplaced. Screw the French when they are robbed for the benefit of other countries, because they steal from other countries using their public companies as well.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- _ink_ 2y agoIs it illegal, tho?
- seiferteric 2y agoI wonder how these "office raids" would work for remote first companies that don't have much of an office presence and with little or no physical documents and everything being stored in the cloud somewhere.
- nerdponx 2y agoIf you can get access to someone's laptop with SSO login access to the cloud storage (or their email inbox and Slack messages), then you have what you need.
- aspenmayer 2y agoIIUC email messages on cloud services older than 180 days don’t even require a US warrant(!) anyway. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/05/update-email-privacy-law-must-go-further https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/05/update-email-privacy-l... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Communications_Privacy_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Communications_Priv...
- Etheryte 2y agoI mean, that would be way easier for the government agencies, no? Just send a subpoena to the service providers, they hand over all the data and you're done?
- crest 2y agoIf everything is synchronised to third party could storage an "office raid" can be as easy as getting a court order telling the cloud provider to make a snapshot of everything stored available to the police.
- spwa4 2y agoIs there a product allowing for client-side encrypted mounts? Or just use a SAAS outside of the country that doesn't allow for exporting any data under any circumstances?
- schnitzelstoat 2y agoIs this what Emily was doing in Paris?
- drooopy 2y agoEmily moves from Paris to Rome and then this happens. Coincidence?
- dylan604 2y agoDoes Emily store all of her boxes of important documents in the spare bathroom too?
- CodinM 2y agodid you literally just spoil this for me
- IncreasePosts 2y agoIt's been out for 2 months, you had your chance
- vulcan01 2y agoPresident Macron spoiled this for everyone in an interview with Variety.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- dvorack101 2y ago[dead]
- I_am_tiberius 2y agoI know I'm likely alone in this opinion, but corporate income tax seems like a poorly designed tax to me. Why should companies pay taxes in a year with high profits, even if they face losses for the next ten years? Why should I pay corporate income tax when dividends and income are taxed anyway? Corporate income tax also seems to heavily influence business strategies as a consequence, which wasn't its intended purpose.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- jaimsam 2y agoA lot of words to say: taxation is theft.
- dennis_jeeves2 2y agoCorrect. There is no 'right' way to tax.
- tnolet 2y agoThe world of tax is complex. Business exist in many shapes and sizes. So... - because companies heavily use government resources like roads and stuff. - because losses can be offset against profits. These tend to be middled out over multiple years. You can port losses to other years. - a lot of companies (holdings etc.) don't pay out income tax and are basically just letterbox companies. These companies need to pay tax on dividends otherwise they would literally pay zero tax.
- I_am_tiberius 2y ago> - because losses can be offset against profits. These tend to be middled out over multiple years. You can port losses to other years. These losses expire (different from country to country)!! Plus, inflation is not taken into account. > a lot of companies (holdings etc.) don't pay out income tax and are basically just letterbox companies. These companies need to pay tax on dividends otherwise they would literally pay zero tax. Tax on dividends is not corporate income tax. Dividend tax is classified as capital gains tax, which is entirely separate. My point is that anyone taking out money must pay taxes through personal income tax or dividend tax. So corporate income tax is just money that would be taxed anyway - or invested/used by the company. So no real purpose other than producing another cash inflow for the government.
- bubbleRefuge 2y agoHow about just get rid of double taxation in corporate taxes? Eventually, taxes will get paid via distributions or sale of stock by individuals.
- Retric 2y agoOr never if the stock is owned by a foreign national, charity, sovereign wealth fund, etc. Reasonable corporate taxes are a net positive for the economy of the county that issues them.
- lokar 2y agoEverything is double, triple, etc taxed. The corp->shareholder thing is an arbitrary point to focus on. Some amount of revenue must be raised. Suggest an alternative. Not taxing corp profits will result is less overall tax income (it wont be made up in shareholder taxes).
- bubbleRefuge 2y agogiven that money is printed/created at the federal level, we don't need a complicated tax enforcement system nor need to tax everything under the sun at the federal level. corporate taxation is a waste of time.
- knallfrosch 2y agoYou do know my income has already been taxed? Why am I paying double tax when buying alcohol? Why is my income taxed when the companies revenues were already taxed? There is no double taxation. Transactions are taxed, not money.
- bubbleRefuge 2y agoincome taxes was what I was refering to.
- mindslight 2y agoWhy not advocate for taxing only corporations, rather than the more oppressive direction of taxing only humans? Corporations intrinsically run on accounting report paperwork, meaning tax forms are an incremental cost rather than a novel burden. And they receive massive benefits from the state - liability protection, outsized access to the legal system, and often direct subsidies.
- phendrenad2 2y agoAs a non-European, it seems like these raids happen regularly to large companies' offices in Europe (mostly US companies). Maybe some Europeans can chime in and answer something that's been bothering me: Does this happen to smaller companies, too? Is it a serious problem to getting work done, not knowing if regulators are going to shut you down and rifle through your filing cabinets?
- knallfrosch 2y agoA raid is a lot of work and only happens when you know you find something. For 99,9% of companies, you get audited every 5—25 years by getting a visit from your local tax authority. Remember: Small/medium companies have comparable companies and you can easily spot the tax dodgers. Or tax dodging is unofficially tolerated to some degree — think restaurants only accepting cash. Most companies are not as blatantly illegal as Uber..
- immibis 2y agoLarge multinational companies are accustomed to openly breaking the law and getting away with it in the USA; when they try to do the same in Europe they are very surprised when the law actually comes after them. They also raid anyone else they don't like, such as people who run Tor exit nodes... but random small businesses are not in that group.
- lacy_tinpot 2y agoMaybe this explains why the US is out ahead in GDP, income, and is doing much better pre and post covid than Europe. It's not so much breaking laws, but unnecessary restrictions and harassment by Europeans states. The US is business friendly. It's industry friendly. We don't needlessly harass the business of sovereign individuals, and the state apparatus isn't being used as an excuse as to exert power or influence over the population. Not to the same paternalistic extent of Europe. In Europe the liberal state apparatus that replaced the monarchies are acting an awful lot like the monarchies.
- sapphire42 2y ago
- johndhi 2y agoSounds like the tech companies won't be expanding outside of Ireland for a while ....
- alexey-salmin 2y agoWell they certainly do want the revenues from users outside of Ireland
- johndhi 2y agoPeople with guns forcibly going through your things with threat of prison time tends to erase desire for revenue. See international business climate in China.
- pas 2y agoAround ~2012 we were chilling on the terrace of a fancy office in the brisk morning (after a quick server migration in the datacenter on the ground floor, which of course turned into an all-nighter) as people were coming in to work, and then suddenly the folks coming in all looked the same, greenish uniform, some had SMGs, oh well. We worked for a small company, so we knew that they're here for the big company that does credit card transactions, but it was both surprising and ... absolutely uneventful, they didn't even talk to us. (As we were leaving we didn't even run into them - at least I don't recall any interaction.) Later the sysadmins of the big company had amazing stories about how the tax authorities wanted copies of every hard drive. And when they told them that, sure, sure, but things are on a RAID and without the config and the card it'll be useless. They didn't care of course :)
- atoav 2y agoThem not paying taxes where I live means they can stay out till they do. Why should I have to compete with multinationals that don't play by the rules? I expect my polkticians not to let themselves be dazzled by the complexity of their tax schemes and tax them the same amount they would if I sold that service here. Does not seem too controversial.
- 2y ago
- bgnn 2y agoDutch are extremely business friendly with streamlined simple bureaucracy but they won't tolerate tax evasion. The correct approach would be to negotiate with the tax service.