News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on The Story of Apple's $14B Tax Bill. Parent comment

Re:The Story of Apple's $14B Tax Bill by bluecalm on Tuesday December 20, 2016 @04:05PM (#13223959)
Only Ivory Tower mad scientist can come up with idea like that. I mean, it's not at all realistic to assess "real value" of those transactions. Investment strategy from Bermuda for 5M, are you going to argue it should really be 3.5M? How are you going to go around proving it? Is this really something public resources should be dedicated to? I mean it just can't work and is ridiculous idea.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The Story of Apple's $14B Tax Bill by bcheung on Tuesday December 20, 2016 @05:18PM (#13224726)
This is not some proposed idea from an Ivory Tower, this is common practice and common sense, practiced by pretty much every tax agency in the world.

Like many laws, there are subjective components and that is what precedents and courts are for.

Tax agencies understand that businesses exist to make a profit and try to come up with systems that are compatible with that.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The Story of Apple's $14B Tax Bill by bluecalm on Thursday December 22, 2016 @06:22AM (#13236547)
Just because everyone is doing it doesn't mean it's a sensible idea. It's a huge failure which makes honest ethical people to pay more in a world where everyone else "optimizes" to bigger or lesser degree. It's a system where the only question is how much you go into shady area. This is a problem at every scale from micro companies to big corps.

>>Like many laws, there are subjective components and that is what precedents and courts are for.

But this is not similar to subjective laws where you need to come-up with interpretation for some case. Here you would need to assess "real value" of every transaction out there which is just not possible.

>>Tax agencies understand that businesses exist to make a profit and try to come up with systems that are compatible with that.

This is not an argument. There exist taxes which are simple in structure and which are not possible to evade without committing forgery. VAT is one such tax, taxing revenue (but not income) is another idea. Income tax isn't like that.

[ Parent | on HN ]