5 ms·

The meat: > Last year, French media outlet La Lettre reported that until 2021, Netflix in France minimised its tax payments by declaring its turnover generated

• kbolino 2y ago
  It'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 ago
    The 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 ago
  Literally 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 ago
      Honestly, 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.
      • marcinzm 2y ago
        If a government says do X and I will cut your takes by Y then is doing X immoral?
        • yunohn 2y ago
          If a government “says”? These large companies actively campaign, draft, and lobby for the legal frameworks and loopholes that they exploit. The government and the companies are the same and are fighting for the same pot of tax money.
        • DrillShopper 2y ago
          It depends on what X is. If X is "install solar panels" or "provide affordable housing" or "reduce greenhouse gas emissions" then X is very likely moral. If X is "lie to us about where your revenue came from" then X is very much immoral.
          • bryanrasmussen 2y ago
            no government says "lie to us about where your revenue came from and we will cut your taxes"
          • 2y ago
• salawat 2y ago
  It 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 ago
  Given Wirecard I wouldn’t assume the EU equally prosecutes or tracks crimes for EU and non-EU companies.
  • DanielHB 2y ago
    They 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 ago
    Isn't the Wirecard case still pending with execs in jail waiting for trial?
    • marcinzm 2y ago
      Only 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 ago
      The 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 ago
    All 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 ago
      Revenue 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 ago
        Purchase 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 ago
          Why 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 ago
  Yeah 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 ago
    Your information is outdated -- Double Irish is no longer applicable according to your own source since 2010.
    • yunohn 2y ago
      No, 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 ago
        It's like eruv. The loophole was planted there for us mortals to find and use it
      • seanhunter 2y ago
        Right. 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 ago
  That'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 ago
    Nation 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 ago
      Do you want euroscepticism? Because that's how you get euroscepticism.
      • mort96 2y ago
        I 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 ago
          I 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
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• _ink_ 2y ago
  Is it illegal, tho?