Re:A Tax Expert Takes Tim Cook's EU Letter Apart Point by Point
by Silhouette on Thursday September 01, 2016 @01:01PM
(#12406948)
A full tax case can easily take 10-15 years.
Which is utterly absurd by any reasonable standard. Governments claiming the money may be faceless machines grinding away, but on the other side it's either a private individual or a business dealing with it.
If it's a private individual, or a small business where the lives of those running it are very directly connected to the business's performance, then any tax investigation forces them to live with a sword hanging over them throughout. That is going to cause considerable distress and potentially to undermine any long term financial planning they want to do, among other harm. Expecting someone to put up with that situation for a few months is bad enough. Expecting someone to put up with it for a decade or more is wildly disproportionate, even in the case of a significant underpayment if it was due to an honest misunderstanding rather than clear and deliberate tax evasion.
Even if we're talking about a large business whose staff might not suffer personally as a result of the case, it's still going to waste staggering amounts of time and resources to participate in an investigation over such a long time. It's going to damage long term financial planning, it's going to be unpleasant for the staff, particularly anyone potentially responsible for any mistakes, and it's going to cost the shareholders a small fortune, and again all of that remains true even if the final conclusion is that no-one did anything wrong or little real harm was done.
I just don't see any justification for these endless legal proceedings or going back far into history. IMHO there should be a statute of limitations of a few years in place after which what's past is past, there should be a strict limit on how long any investigation can last before either formal legal proceedings are held or the matter is dropped permanently, and ideally both of those time limits should be in some way proportionate to the scale of the alleged shortfall.
Which is utterly absurd by any reasonable standard. Governments claiming the money may be faceless machines grinding away, but on the other side it's either a private individual or a business dealing with it.
If it's a private individual, or a small business where the lives of those running it are very directly connected to the business's performance, then any tax investigation forces them to live with a sword hanging over them throughout. That is going to cause considerable distress and potentially to undermine any long term financial planning they want to do, among other harm. Expecting someone to put up with that situation for a few months is bad enough. Expecting someone to put up with it for a decade or more is wildly disproportionate, even in the case of a significant underpayment if it was due to an honest misunderstanding rather than clear and deliberate tax evasion.
Even if we're talking about a large business whose staff might not suffer personally as a result of the case, it's still going to waste staggering amounts of time and resources to participate in an investigation over such a long time. It's going to damage long term financial planning, it's going to be unpleasant for the staff, particularly anyone potentially responsible for any mistakes, and it's going to cost the shareholders a small fortune, and again all of that remains true even if the final conclusion is that no-one did anything wrong or little real harm was done.
I just don't see any justification for these endless legal proceedings or going back far into history. IMHO there should be a statute of limitations of a few years in place after which what's past is past, there should be a strict limit on how long any investigation can last before either formal legal proceedings are held or the matter is dropped permanently, and ideally both of those time limits should be in some way proportionate to the scale of the alleged shortfall.