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I'm not angry with companies that avoid tax legally. It's in their nature to maximise profits! Of course they'll do that if you give them the opportunity. I'm a
by Jabbles 14y ago
I'm not angry with companies that avoid tax legally. It's in their nature to maximise profits! Of course they'll do that if you give them the opportunity. I'm angry at our government for making it legal, by allowing loopholes and flawed laws to exist in the first place.
- mtrimpe 14y agoThe thing is that to address this tax strategies would need to be aligned on a global scale. Accounting like this is very much like (grey-hat?) hacking; you have a very large and complicated system and you simply need to find the weakest spot. Defending against that can't really be done when you only have control over a single component of that system.
- buro9 14y agoI'm pro-European, but I would argue that pulling out of Europe to force accounting for UK sales to occur in the UK legal domain might be a very good start. At least this way each country would be incentivised to enforce tax locally in a controllable and predictable way. And I'm sure that whilst some companies might wish to pull out, most would stay. a profit is a profit, it may be less than before but if you're still creating profit you wouldn't give it up.
- toyg 14y agoThat would actually have the opposite effect: corporations would simply "optimize" even more around the UK system, and it'd be easier for them to push money even further away from the reach of UK authorities. What is needed is a strong European effort to align taxation, which would remove any benefit from schemes like the Double-Dutch and Double-Irish, and then levy heavy taxes on capital flight outside European borders. This, of course, if our elites actually cared about tax evasion, which they really don't -- can't risk to find those revolving doors shut when it's your turn to bow out.
- sseveran 14y agoNothing about it is grey hat. The techniques for a global business to shift taxes into a low tax country is well known in an global tax planning group.
- nmcfarl 14y agoI may be misunderstanding but it sounds to me like you are arguing that widespread use of a technique makes it ethical. This /really/ doesn’t align with my morals, which are definitely not a popularity contest.
- lucian1900 14y agoTax laws are needlessly complicated almost everywhere (the UK being a particularly horrid example). That's part of the reason loopholes are so easy to find.
- jefffoster 14y agoI saw a good analogy of the tax system to computer code. The inland revenue express their intent of the tax system in code (or at least legalese). It's the job of accountants to exploit bugs in the tax system. To misuse a famous quote: "There are two ways of constructing a tax system. One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies."
- Jabbles 14y ago"no obvious deficiencies" I would argue there is something obviously wrong. And I blame the government for not fixing it quickly. And the people for not being loud enough.
- raverbashing 14y agoNo law is perfect The more rules and regulations there are the more easy it is to game the system The simplest tax is the most effective, but of course bureaucratic behemoths are too stupid to realize that.