Yea, good point. We live in an age when a whole set of duplicitous practices are now just referred to as "growth hacking"

Ugh, the number of dark patterns trying to cost me money just to purchase a damned ticket on Ticketbastards today.

Seriously by not clicking the right boxes I could have agreed to pay an extra $42 in add-ons/services for a $15 ticket that had its own $6 in fees added.

Agreed 100%. I usually call the venue and ask if I can purchase tickets directly from them instead of going through Ticketmaster. They don't always say yes, but it's usually cheaper and more pleasant when they do.

Not to mention paying an extra $8 to print your own ticket.

A fool and their money are soon parted.

For Ticketmaster? That's odd, I deal with them quite a bit, and while they've definitely got a racket going on, usually they aren't opting you in for extra stuff (because you'll juts call to complain to their support and get it changed). I have seen them accidentally auto-select certain additions before, but that was a non-standard option on that event, and it was definitely a mistake.

It would be much easier to believe it was a mistake if the balance of "mistakes in the company's favor" vs "mistakes in the customer's favor" were even.

If all the mistakes go the company's way, then, at best, the company is working much harder at avoiding mistakes that hurt themselves than they are at getting it right.

This goes for credit card companies and many other firms.

They like to do things where they offer you something with a yes/no option but don't explain that it's an offer (no call to action or question) and put the price of the service in the smallest text possible.

Oh, I would believe that. They'll make it easy for you to add charges on, and make it confusing as to whether it charges you (if you aren't familiar with the page), they just don't generally have them defaulted to on in my experience (and I buy a lot of tickets from them). They're very good at being just annoying enough to use that you don't like them, but generally not so annoying that you'll refuse to use them, which combined with their existing market dominance keeps them on top.

I paid for extra insurance without meaning to last time I visited their site. Pretty sure the "opt in" button was checked by default.

That's interesting. I wonder if it's saved per account, and defaults to what was last set. It's definitely not defaulted on with my orders.

The other side of the growth hacking coin is retention, which is also fraught with systematic duplicity and dark patterns. Each of us needs to exercise our judgement about how we put food on the table. And if you don't know how the company that signs your checks gets the money to do so, you need to find out.

The problem is that when some manager asks to work on something unethical, the technical people fall over eachother in trying to implement it first.

Lesson: not everything which can be implemented should. And elegant solutions to unethical problems are still ugly.

reminds me of this: https://deardesignstudent.com/in-praise-of-the-ak-47-a24cc8a...

Well, Total Information Awareness won't build itself, you know. Not yet, anyway.

Or rather "many big $biz_sector companies".

indeed! But the question is ... can tax evasion be considered an ethical violation? :)

Well, by definition yes. Tax evasion and tax fraud are equivalent.

I think you mean tax avoidance, which is quite a different matter. While there's a lot of debate on the matter, in the United States at least, the general rule of thumb was laid down in 1934, and is as follows.

> Any one may so arrange his affairs that his taxes shall be as low as possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which will best pay the Treasury; there is not even a patriotic duty to increase one's taxes -- Judge Learned Hand

Possibly.

However tax evasion and avoidance are often confused, for a public company not avoiding taxes would most certainly be an ethical violation.

While a public company answers to it's shareholders, it also has a responsibility to support the community it lives within, because often success can be directly attributed to where the company started. Aggressively avoiding taxes could very well be considered unethical by some parties.

Some may consider avoiding taxes to be unethical, others might say not avoiding them would violate a fiduciary duty.

From my very minimal accounting course I remember my teacher, who was serving as part of the tax appeals board at the time, telling us that we were allowed to use any opening in the law to save tax but we were not allowed to lie.

The intent of my comment was to draw attention to the other side of this coin.

>You are allowed to use any opening in the law to save on taxes, but not lie.

The other side of that is:

If you (as a C(ETF)O of a company) do not use every opening in the law to save on taxes you may be violating a fiduciary duty to your shareholders.

Oddly enough nobody is concerned with fiduciary duty when a CEO pulls a few million dollar bonus out of a failing company.

The shareholders and board very much are, although for a failing company often they will set up a CEO with the explicit goal to wind down the company my milking it to death (which often takes many months or years, and starts long before employees would be notified about the plan) and offer multimillion bonuses conditional on extracting dozens more millions for shareholders from a dead horse by riding it in sunset until all that's left is debt to "someone else".

The CEOs don't set their comp.

Also, depending on the company "a few million dollars" isn't even a meaningful amount of money.

When people bring up "fiduciary duty" in either a taxes or outsourcing context (i.e. it's Apple's fiduciary duty to build its products in China), I always ask for a pointer to a successful lawsuit in which this particular fiduciary duty was enforced.

Yes, in theory it's their fiduciary duty to minimize taxes, but I've never heard of a board being sued because they didn't squeeze every last dollar out of their tax bill.

First link in the quick Google search I did, which starts with a story where Henry Ford wanted to stop paying special dividends to partial owners. "At trial, Ford testified to his belief that the company made too much money and had an obligation to benefit the public and the firm’s workers and customers." The judge did no agree. I haven't read the whole article yet, but it seems definitely to apply (and also notes there is little precedent in this area).

1: http://www.professorbainbridge.com/professorbainbridgecom/20...

I'd say a 100 year old case speaks to a lack of enforcement of fiduciary duty in the courts.

On the other hand, "Henry Ford got smacked for it" speaks loud enough to stop most executives and their corporate lawyers from testing the waters. Even if some time has passed.

That's just an example of fiduciary duty, not one relevant to taxes or outsourcing, which I mentioned in my original comment.

Again, has anyone every sued a company to demand that they try harder to lower their tax bill or move operations overseas?

Some companies even brag about NOT outsourcing. Socially conscious marketing.

>not one relevant to taxes or outsourcing, which I mentioned in my original comment.

Perhaps this is related to the fact that I wasn't responding to your comment?

>Some companies even brag about NOT outsourcing. Socially conscious marketing.

And?

I think their point is: does refraining from outsourcing expose a company's leadership to fiduciary duty risk?

If such a decision is overwhelmingly likely a bad choice, most likely yes.

However, obviously there's always potential risks and costs involved in outsourcing that need to be taken into account when evaluating such decisions.

This would also presumably require that the leadership be informed of the obviously better course of action.

The dispute was about dividends. No mention of taxes or outsourcing.

(Semi off-topic)

Maybe not what you want, but in 2008, the CEO of KBS, South Korea's public broadcasting corporation, was fired by the government for having agreed to court settlement in dispute with National Tax Service over how much tax KBS should pay.

Yes, he was fired because he had followed the settlement suggested by the freaking court. (The real reason was that he was a liberal appointed by the previous president Roh, and the new government led by conservative Lee Myung-Bak wanted him gone.)

Years later the court ruled that the firing was unlawful (duh), but somehow he wasn't reinstated, and anyways, the damage was done.

So you are of course not taking any advantage of Pension tax reliefs in your 401K and IRA's ?

There's a big difference between taking advantage of pension tax reliefs in exactly the way a tax authority designed them to be used and creating an offshore subsidiary charging artificial royalties to exploit the tax authority's openness to actual foreign-owned businesses investing in the local area.

401K/IRA tax avoidance techniques are codified in law to encourage people to save for retirement so we don't have generations of elderly homeless people.

The tax loopholes that companies like Apple tax advantage of are another thing entirely.

>The tax loopholes that companies like Apple tax advantage of are another thing entirely.

No, the significant ones (i.e. offshore subsidiaries) are very much codified.

Letter of the law vs. spirit of the law.

Subsidiaries in countries with low tax rates certainly aren't against the spirit of the law.

Isn't the spirit to promote foreign investment, as opposed to domestic companies restructuring themselves to look foreign on paper?

I'd imagine it's more about not driving all the domestic companies away.

But.. what about my version of ethics! If only there were a way to take a tally of issues among groups of people with different opinions of ethics and morals..

There's a very clear fiduciary duty to pay as little money in taxes as you can, there exists no such duty to pay too much taxes.

This is very black and white.

No, it isn't. Your statement is wrong and based on a flawed interpretation of Dodge v. Ford that makes the rounds on the Internet and refuses to die.

Thank you. Actions that are deemed to have been taken solely for their tax effects are clearly and explicitly deemed tax evasion by the IRS, and are prosecuted as such. I believe other countries have similar standards. There's a lot of room to give people the benefit of the doubt, e.g. by counting the good will from charitable activities as a credible alternate reason, but there's no license and certainly no requirement to cheat.

>Actions that are deemed to have been taken solely for their tax effects are clearly and explicitly deemed tax evasion by the IRS

This is just not true.

Here are some citations.

https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-drop/n-14-58.pdf

https://www.irs.gov/Businesses/Guidance-for-Examiners-and-Ma...

Just look up "sham transaction" for plenty more. It's a very well established concept and doctrine. Nobody should be splitting hairs about avoiding vs. evading taxes, or generally pontificating about fiduciary duty, without understanding it.

That's not what you said though.

>Actions that are deemed to have been taken solely for their tax effects are clearly and explicitly deemed tax evasion by the IRS

What you said would make almost all tax avoidance into tax evasion. Hell, even claiming deductions would by your logic be tax evasion.

You didn't read the citations before saying that, did you?

The citations do not support your original claim.

No? Could you expand on that a little please.

Based on my reading there certainly exists such a duty when it's beneficial, obviously tax avoidance isn't explicitly beneficial though. Potential law changes or even bad press could cost more than the amount of money saved.

No, there isn't. There is a fiduciary duty to act in the best interest of shareholders. To extrapolate that out to tax evasion is just plain silly.

I suggest you reread my comments as I never made such a connection.

tax avoidance=/=tax evasion

Could you please try to be more consistent about which of your two accounts - ryanlol vs. ryanl0l - you use for your replies here? Keeping up with one is tedious enough.

You should reconsider whatever client program you're using if it's causing issues.

It's not my client. It's you replying with one account so you can still downvote with the other. That "all's fair" attitude seems to exist in more domains than just taxes.

If you're that worried about your internet points, perhaps you should email [email protected] and find out that I've in fact not downvoted your replies.

(In the future you might want to do that before accusing others of such)

What? No it wouldn't.