> Why should tax payers bail out a tax avoiding company?

I think that depends on our answer to the prior question, "Why should tax payers bail out any company?" If the answer is "because we like them and we feel a patriotic/moral/righteous duty to help them", then the distinction between tax-paying and tax-avoiding companies does seem relevant. But if the answer is "to help workers keep their jobs", then the distinction might not be relevant.

> "because we like them and we feel a patriotic/moral/righteous duty to help them"

Sounds like an abusive relationship. Again, if a company wants to be bailed out by the tax payer, I don't think it's a stretch to ask that they pay taxes.

Otherwise it's like me, a foreigner with no connection to Denmark other than that I've 'helped the economy' when I went on vacation there last year asking for a bailout.

> But if the answer is "to help workers keep their jobs", then the distinction might not be relevant.

In many European countries, social safety nets exist so you don't have to reward cancerous businesses for terrible business practices, while still ensuring individuals are looked after in the event things go sideways.

Just replying to myself, I was incredulous that cruise lines were requesting a bailout from the US taxpayer. They've been registering their ships in Panama, the BVI and Liberia to avoid minimum wage law, labor laws and paying taxes. They make staff work 8-20 hours a day 7 days a week for months on end, paying well below market wages. [1]

Need a bailout? Ask the Liberians.

Similarly, these companies should be asking for bailouts from the tax havens in which they are registered. Surely all those "registration fees" they've been paying to avoid taxes are being kept safely for just such an occasion.

None of this is making me feel super patriotic/moral/righteous duty for them.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/cruise-line-workers-reveal-g...

> I was incredulous that cruise lines were requesting a bailout from the US taxpayer.

Why wouldn't you expect them to ask for free money? It doesn't cost them anything. They didn't receive the bailouts for the reasons you mentioned.

I mean I can ask for anything I want, that doesn't make it a good look haha.

> In many European countries, social safety nets exist

They only exist because they are funded by taxing economic activity. If governments could just will them into being without restriction than every country in the world could have European level social safety nets.

If economic activity declines, so does the money faucet funding the social safety nets.

Even more reason not to bail out companies that don’t pay taxes then.

On the long run yes, on the sort run they could do some money printing to fill the hole. (which is what we're seeing now)

The government has unilateral ability to invent jobs and even invent money if the goal is to help workers keep their jobs and/or remain fed and housed. So I feel that no company should get a bailout. If they fail, they fail, and the government can scoop up the workers and create an agency or just government-staked company that does the same thing, find some work in the country that needs doing and put the workers on it, or stipend the workers until they find a new job.

Of course, that means the failed company's executive board has to also find a way to actually add value...

The government can invent jobs, but it can't invent infinite jobs that accomplish something that people want, and even when it can the task won't generally be accomplished as efficiently as a private company would. It's also very difficult to remove a government agency once one is created. Government has all kinds of incentive problems that private companies don't, so generally (IMO) it's best to only use government to accomplish a task that the private sector does very poorly because of some market failure.

There's also a large cost to having people reallocate from one job to another, and from having businesses go under. There's physical capital that needs to be reallocated and "organizational" capital (not sure the right word, but I mean the way the business is organized) that may be permanently lost.

On top of organizational capital, you're also losing tacit knowledge when a business dissolves.

For historic reasons states have built systems that prevent normal governments from inventing money at scale: Independent Central Banks. It's of course an important ongoing debate in economics whether this is still appropriate, but it's unrealistic to expect governments to so dramatically alter the fundamental structure of monetary policy. That said, of course it's even more unrealistic to expect them to do so absent a massive external shock.

> For historic reasons states have built systems that prevent normal governments from inventing money at scale: Independent Central Banks.

Could you explain this? I think the CB system does not quite prevent money creation, it just makes it less transparent. Inventing a jargon to nice sounding words to hide the creation of money (yes I look at you "quantative easing") also does not help.

If govts wanted to limit their power to create money, they could have made some constitutional law or smth.

I feel the CB system is more an invention by the bank(er)s, than by govts. If you look at the timing and trickery involved in singing the CBs into law all over the world, you will see this is not something done with full governmental/public awareness and consent. To the contrary.

It's about people being able to trust their currency. Let me explain: suppose that your government was creating a huge amount of money out of nothing. It would result in a massive inflation and, with the value of money being completely unstable, people would resort to alternative ways of paying for thing: a more stable foreign currency, gold, crypto currencies, or even barter. You can see it happening in countries with a massive inflation (Zimbabwe, or Argentina in the early 2000's are the examples that are on top of my mind). So, this is a scenario the governments have to avoid at all cost, and in theory they should create just enough money so the inflation matches the growth of the country.

However, the growth of the country is very hard to measure (directly taking the growth of the GDP would not necessarily match it), so there is no consensus on what the inflation should be exactly, which gives the authority in charge of creating money some leeway on exactly how much money to create. If this authority was the government, it would be tempting to have the inflation be slightly higher than the country's growth, in order to "trick" people into believing that they got slightly richer and have them spend more. And this could work for some time, but at some point people would become wary of the government and as a result would spend less, slowing down the economy. So it becomes a game (in the sense of game theory) between the government and the consumers, and the solution is to have an independent entity in charge of money creation, so people can know with more certainty that the "right" amount of money is being created.

I think it's the other way around. CB create money as compared to governments, and they are rather insulated from pressure to create money in normal times. The point being to limit the danger of runaway inflation if governments decide to print money arbitrarily. BUT I am very very far from being an expert or even terribly well read on any of this.

It seems to me it would be a lot more useful if we create money and the government spends it (e.g. on infrastructure, or by distributing it directly to people most likely to spend it), rather than indirectly creating it through QE (which in mechanism, if not in effect seems quite different from printing money), etc.

QE still is recognized as a liability on the balance sheet and funds have to be raised and repaid via treasury bonds. That’s actually quite a long ways away from arbitrary printing.

The government can’t invent jobs that bring in more revenue than they cost though. If everyone does unsustainable jobs with printed money, you’ll have hyperinflation and then collapse.

> If they fail, they fail, and the government can scoop up the workers

This is a government forced failure. That’s a great way to turn every small business owner (a huge part of the middle class) against the pandemic containment efforts and the government in general.

"The government can’t invent jobs that bring in more revenue than they cost though."

Why not? Is there some reason why a private medical researcher is somehow better than a government medical researcher?

Because a private medical researcher has to actually be funded. In other words, the expected value of the researcher is in excess of the researcher’s cost.

Nobody pays medical researchers without expecting an ROI unless it’s for a charity (in which case it’s funded by other excess value in the economy).

There isn’t really a meaningful difference between the government spending $100 to get $2 of value and spending $100 to get $0 of value. If we’re going down the unsustainable jobs path, it would be much easier to just pay everyone $80k/year to do nothing.

"In other words, the expected value of the researcher is in excess of the researcher’s cost."

So what magical property of being hired by a government destroys that expected value?

I think "to help workers keep their jobs" is not a good enough reason. I might be wrong but to me the main beneficiaries of companies staying open are not regular workers, but the owners / CEOs / shareholders.

What if the answer is "to strike a balance between many workers being able to keep their jobs and disincentivizing tax-avoidance"?

The best way to disincentive tax avoidance would be to not allow it in the first place. A one-off policy like this punishes tax avoidance without necessarily discouraging it in the future. It depends on how likely businesses think it is for something like this to happen again.

I think there is a lot of lobbying for tax avoidance. But maybe that's just my perception of govts using democracy as a banner while in reality policy is much more influenced by lobby effort than voters sentiment.

I'm sure you're right. Lobbying for tax avoidance is a classic example of rent-seeking. I'm just trying to point out that this is an empty gesture from the government. It makes people feel good but it doesn't really prevent tax avoidance in the future. If that was the goal, there's a much more direct way to do it.

That could be the real answer, for sure. Or the aggregate answer, maybe, in the sense of "we need to do X, but can't do too much of Y, because then voters will notice and get angry." In that case, it might not be a deliberate choice at all, just the reality of politics in a democracy.

If it was a deliberate choice, my instinct would be that designing one policy with a dual mandate sounds a lot more complicated and less effective than designing two policies. It's a lot simpler to target a bailout to saving jobs only, say, and then separately change the tax code to disincentivize tax havens. That would also separate the part that needs to be done urgently, from the part we could do whenever.

>But if the answer is "to help workers keep their jobs", then the distinction might not be relevant.

But this sets up a relationship where now the company can use the employee's employment as a form of hostage.

> this sets up a relationship where now the company can use the employee's employment as a form of hostage.

Well, at least in this occasion there is an external factor at play. So the hostage situation is not premeditated as much as when a company uses the hostages as leverage when negotiating tax break.

Because keeping jobs is important as it is harder to create them.

Joblosses are talent moving away. Shops that will never reopen.

There is some truth to that line of thought.

Either it is legal to avoid taxes, then no distinction should be made. Or it is illegal, in which they should be persecuted.

But making this distinction as a means to "punish" certain companies seems to conflate two unrelated issues.

Bailouts are a reward. Not getting a reward is not a punishment.

If you buy a lottery ticket and win, your neighbor was not punished for not buying a ticket.

That's just semantics. Whether you see it as a reward for some or a punishment for others is besides the point. The argument is about companies getting treated unequally with no just cause.

To spoonerize a colonial slogan, No representation without taxation.

Is there just cause to use tax money to help companies who have not paid taxes? Is that fair to the companies who put their money in that pot, to have it doled out to those who didn't? Should companies be treated equally, when they don't behave equally? Because I'm unconvinced that countries owe tax-dodgers a dime. I think that their employees, being taxpayers, should have a safety net in case their employers neither pay taxes nor save for a rainy day. Let this be a lesson to the executives and let their ventures fail.

The point I'm trying to drive at is that bailouts are not a reward. If they were a reward, we wouldn't wait until emergencies to issue them. Rather, they're an emergency response, and in that sense they should really be optimized for effectively addressing the emergency, regardless of what feels fair.

It's not that. The issue is that companies have figured out that ups and downs happen, so if they sail close enough to the wind they capture the upside while their limited liability and bailouts protect them from the downside. Privatize profit, socialize risk. The people they are placing that risk onto are not obliged to accept it.

Just like there aren't enough masks and ventilators to go around for the patients, there's also not enough money to bail everybody out. Hence, triage.

Bailouts are there to create incentives for the future. In the future companies know they can save money by going to tax haven but potentially not get a bailout.

What is the positive criteria?

Who gets aid, and how is the amount calculated? It's somewhat surprising that foreign company would be eligible at all.

Also, I'm skeptical of "common sense rules" being effectively implementable.

Company A1 owns intellectual property like trademarks and patents, registered in a tax haven. Company A2 manufactures & markets products in the consumer country. A2 could be paying licence fees to A1. A1 could be contracting A2 to do manufacturing and marketing. Either way, the idea is that A2 never makes profits. Any profits are made in A1, which also has no expenses.

This is/was Google & Apple's structure, with Ireland as the tax haven.

This is a simple example. Reality is usually more complex. It is generally hard/impossible to pick these knots apart. IDK of any country with corporate tax rules/enforcement that has picked it apart. Lots have tried. How did denmark do this.

If you think at all about why a company was registered in a tax haven to begin with, then it's clear that they shouldn't even be in a line to get bailouts from "foreign entities" (from the point of view of the company) at all.

If a company wants to be eligible for benefits inside a country, they have to follow all the laws.

No ifs, buts, ands.

If you feel that the company is "doing good work" why not ask them to be registered in the country to begin with? OR better - move headquarters into the country being discussed (or have that be a condition for receiving bailout funds).

All this said, I think it's up to the government of the Tax Havens themselves to support these companies. These tax havens derive significant benefit from being used in this way. It's time for the tax haven to step up and provide funding for support during this challenging time.

>>If a company wants to be eligible for benefits inside a country, they have to follow all the laws.

Minimizing tax liability is not necessarily doing anything outside the law.

That is only a very small part of why companies incorporate in tax havens.

Extradition policies, consumer protection laws, intellectual property status (ie whether you can use a tax haven incorporation to shield yourself from patent lawsuits or even to use it to hoard patents so you can use it as a base for launching law suits on others, forcing them to come to court in the tax haven jurisdiction for disputes)

There are so many things tax havens are used for. And that is why incorporating inside of the country where they are trying to get bailouts from is so important, otherwise the tax payer's money will be used against their own interests, with no way of enforcement.

Tax haven registered companies are the Nigerian Prince's of the corporate world. It is very possible they might be legit (and some very legit businesses are tax haven registered), but the very fact that they registered there on purpose is very telling in itself. Telling you they can swindle you with or without your consent.

I don't think that's quite what parent meant. There's a difference between

"Does not break any rules"

and

"Follows all the rules"

Where the gap is in whether the entity is subject to the rules. You are correct that one that isn't subject to the rules is right to not follow them.

But, where the outcome of those rules incurs some benefit, why should the non-subject incur it?

> Why should tax payers bail out a tax avoiding company?

Tax avoidance also tends to be on profits. A lot of companies in the US have done corporate inversions, but they're still paying local payroll, property, and sales taxes. Freezing dividends and buybacks punishes the people who benefited from the tax avoidance, but you have to be careful not to do this at the expense of workers.

The other argument, and this is from a US perspective, is you're pushing 20% unemployment, why are you wasting your time promoting your political passion project? Spend the money, ask questions later.

I think the response would be that most of these governments* are not spending the money to keep the businesses open - they're spending it to keep employees solvent. To accomplish that, not all businesses need to be saved.

*The USA is an obvious exception where for at least a substantial group of people, the purpose is to keep the businesses intact. They really couldn't care less about the employees.

There are 30.2 million small businesses in the US, which comprise a whopping 99.9% of all United States businesses and make up for the lion's share of employment. This is very different from Europe.

By bailing out the small business owners, you have a better chance at maintaining employment or for employment to re-emerge after a crisis.

Small business ownership is also a huge source of middle class wealth here in the US. Bailing out small business is essentially bailing out 30 million owner/employers and preserving their middle class wealth.

Obviously big businesses get bailouts here as well, and I happen to agree that if they use money for buy backs, dividends, etc. they should not get stimulus money.

Those stats are a little misleading. Only 18% of employees work at businesses with fewer than 20 employees. And of course most businesses are smaller - it's a lot easier to spend an afternoon filling out "LLC in a box" forms than it is to create a "large" business!

Well I would include larger private companies in that group, you could have 100 employees and still be a small business - for example you could own a small chain of restaurants or franchises, or several hair salons.

But yes really small businesses employ about a fifth of the population.

> By bailing out the small business owners, you have a better chance at maintaining employment or for employment to re-emerge after a crisis.

Why is the goal to maintain employment? Seems like the government wants to keep people on their little hamster wheels.

Those “hamster wheels” are the reason we get to eat, have internet, have shelter with heat/AC. It’s gonna get pretty miserable if we just pay everyone to stay home and do nothing.

> Why is the goal to maintain employment? Seems like the government wants to keep people on their little hamster wheels.

Well, common sense seems to suggest that we would want to have an operational economy again at some point. That generally requires there to be jobs available to people.

What is the alternative to "their little hamster wheels", exactly?

Possibly giving the money directly to the employees, rather than paying their employers?

>they're spending it to keep employees solvent. To accomplish that, not all businesses need to be saved.

To accomplish that, they only need to deposit money into people’s bank account. No employer middleman is required.

A recipient of USA PPP money (our business disaster relief fund) who does not spend it on payroll will have a loan that is due in 18 months. If you spend on payroll (and there are rules to prevent abuse) most of PPP will be forgiven. The USA is clearly trying to keep employees solvent, and as a USA based business owner, I care deeply about my employees, and so do most other business owners I know.

The USA has the self-inflicted problem that we need to keep a maximal number of corporations intact in order to keep employees solvent because US healthcare is unfortunately primarily "employer managed".

> The government should take a small ownership stake in companies that receive that kind of money.

This sounds absolutely reasonable. Bail them out by being some sort of "angel investor" and get a piece of the company

That's what the UK government did with some of the banks here in 2008 - although in the case of RBS, HMG ended up with a 58% stake.

> The government should take a small ownership stake in companies that receive that kind of money.

I'm only familiar with US law, not Danish so question for you here.

Under US law, when a company closes (bankruptcy, acquired, etc), the common shareholders are last in line for payments after debt holders and preferred shareholders. Does Danish law have a similar provision?

If so, wouldn't being a debtor be a stronger position? Especially since the governments get to set repayment terms.

Yes, if we look at the bankruptcy scenario only (and provided the debt is not secured). But the shareholder is typically better off if there is an upside. What we saw in the last financial crisis is that large corporations quickly paid off their loans and the government - the taxpayers - missed out on the upside.

The natural way to give government ownership would be through convertibles so they could chose whether to convert.

That makes total sense, thanks for the info and perspective.

I totally agree with you, especially the last point. Not only that, any company that has an excessive amount of cash or cash-like securities (e.g. Apple) should not receive state-aid. Of course Apple is not asking but it's just an example. We should further limit the salary of management once they receive aid.

Interestingly that list contained Greenland until very recently.

EU countries are also not included in the list, so no Luxembourg etc

The list of EU defined tax havens is intentionally incomplete without including Ireland, Malta and Switzerland.

https://timesofmalta.com/articles/view/malta-a-fiscal-black-...

and English Channel islands, London, Luxembourg, for some purposes Netherlands and so on. Heck, even Denmark is often rated as tax haven because of certain advantages [1]

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/articles/wealth-management/1215...

These days dividends are less popular than share buybacks (in part because the former is taxed as income and the latter as deferred capital gains taxed at the time of sale).

I hope politicians weren't sufficiently stupid as to close one avenue and leave the other wide open.

> Why should tax payers bail out a tax avoiding company?

Because every company optimizes its tax burden. “Tax Avoidance” is an arbitrary political clap trap to drum up outrage.

Denmark is a tax haven itself though.

You're thinking of the Netherlands where the Dutch live (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_Sandwich).

Denmark is a different country, but they're often confused for one another by Americans.

I am Danish so I think I manage to not get confused :)

I strongly doubt it. The corporate tax provisions are stricter than most developed economies. All indexes I've seen have Denmark pretty far down tax haven friendliness. Genuinely curious on your source.

There is a type of company structure similar to a limited partnership, but where the ownership was anonymous: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kommanditselskab

That was apparently misused by a relatively small companies abroad, where passing profits through this company would keep the information from the right authorities. Not really sure what happened with the case, new rulesets were applied to combat potential abuse.

Another high profile case was the "Danish Bank" (not to be confused with the national Bank of Denmark) which was involved in some huge money laundering in Estonia, potentially allowing as much as 200 billion EUR pass through it without asking too many questions.

A report from the Tax Justice Network: https://fsi.taxjustice.net/PDF/Denmark.pdf

Thank you. I was aware of the money laundering. What Danske Bank did is under investigation for being illegal under 'hvidvaskloven'. Let's see how that goes, but the company and its directors are expected to face consequences.

That case has nothing to do with a 'tax haven', unless a pattern is formed and the authorities turn a blind eye.

I didn't know about the Kommanditselskab company form. It does appear to have been abused, but I can see this is something the tax authorities are on the case with.

Link in Danish to a report from 2016:

https://www.ft.dk/samling/20151/almdel/SAU/bilag/165/1619506...

How possible it is to act as a tax have and how friendly a country is to be used like that is a spectrum. The Tax Justice Network report you linked puts Denmark very low on that ranking and tiny (their word) in volume.

That's not what I am talking about though. I am talking about the zero tax rate for holdning companies. it's an active strategy by the Danish government.

Not for holding companies. It's a well known secret and is a way for the Danish government to lure in large international holdning companies.

No sure why people are downvoting me. I'm Danish and I do know the tax system pretty well.

It's probably because you're calling Denmark a tax haven without providing any documentation? Denmark is not recognised as a tax haven by any country (that I'm aware of). I'm willing to learn something new, but you are not providing any support for your statements.

That doesn't mean you should assume I don't know the difference between Denmark and Holland.

Tax haven is not an official title for any country or place but a definition and Denmark is by definition a tax haven for holdning companies.

Just because it's not well known doesn't mean it's not a tax haven. That word is quite ambiguous. Most countries have some sort of setup to attract foreign investments.

"Back in 1999, Denmark allowed Danish companies to hold shares in foreign subsidiaries. In 2009, the Danish government enacted the Danish Tax Reform Act allowing international corporate investors to use Denmark as a holding company jurisdiction. The 2009 Danish Tax Reform law improved Danish participation exemptions applied to dividends and capital gains realized on the transfer of shares by abolishing the holding periods of one year and three years respectively.

Another benefit is the ability to receive dividend payments subject to little or no taxes. Other tax haven jurisdictions often do not provide such benefits. The condition for a no tax status on dividends is that an entity owns at least 25% of the Danish company.

PepsiCo and other large international companies have established over 500 Danish holding companies over the past few years. PepsiCo Investments, the PepsiCo Danish Holding Company, is managed from a small Copenhagen office by one tax lawyer. Such international demand created a dynamic holding company industry in Denmark.

In essence, Denmark allows the registration of completely tax-free holding companies. Dutch holding companies can receive income from numerous different sources and simply pass them to other corporations in different countries. This is why holding companies are globally famous for their tax free funds “pass through” capabilities."

https://www.offshorecompany.com/company/denmark-holding/

And then you go on to provide me a source that calls Denmark Dutch multiple times... Måske du lige skulle læse det igennem du copy-paster?

Tax havens are places that are recognised as such. It's not any country with a tax loophole. There are plenty of lists of tax havens and Denmark is not on those lists. That, of course, doesn't make Denmark immune to having tax loopholes, but it's just a bad premise for any discussion to volunteer your own special definition that contradicts most of the facts out there.

Please read the actual source.

Here is another

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/wealth-management/1215...

It's obvious you don't know Danish tax law. Let's just leave it at that.

If these companies aren't allowed to pay a dividend until they have paid back the government aid, isn't the government effectively taking an ownership stake?

No it's not. The government won't own any shares that benefit from an increase in share price, nor will they receive dividends. The government can only receive the government aid back. It works as a forgivable loan. Loan-holders almost always come before equity-holders, and they could require full payment before dividends to equity holders.

Ideally, as grandparent notes, yes. But no, there's an obvious way out: Instead of paying dividends, reinvest would-be outgoing cash back into the company. On the phone, claim to follow the Amazon playbook. In addition to not having to give up anything to the government, the company might find itself improving!

So, companies acting completely legally by seeking to minimize their tax burden, which serves to further maximize the money available for their owners, get penalized. Likewise, companies acting completely ethically, by returning much of their profit to their shareholders via dividends instead of hoarding it themselves get penalized. And this gets celebrated?

I think you'll find a lot of people do not agree with your definition of "penalized". Not giving something to someone who was never entitled to it is not penalizing.

> So, companies acting completely legally by seeking to minimize their tax burden, which serves to further maximize the money available for their owners, get penalized

It's fairly simple. If you don't want to pay the government, the government doesn't want to pay you. Just as you are acting legally in tax avoidance, they are acting legally in not bailing you out.

> Likewise, companies acting completely ethically, by returning much of their profit to their shareholders via dividends instead of hoarding it themselves get penalized.

This did strike me as strange, but there are several interpretations. As an example, if you're doing well enough to be paying dividends, you don't need to be bailed out.

IF someone is offered an advantage not offered to me then I have been penalized.

The rules:

1. You can incorporate in a tax-advantaged state ("tax haven") and not get benefits ("bail outs")

2. You can incorporate in a non-tax-advantaged state (eg. Denkmark) and get benefits ("bail outs")

Your company has chosen option 1 but you are claiming that your company is being penalized because you can't get the benefits of both options.

Do you feel penalized every time you can't park in a convenient parking spot because it's reserved for people with mobility issues?

Responding to "you'll find a lot of people do not agree with your definition of penalized" with your preferred definition of the word doesn't exactly further the conversation.

All companies are being penalized by nearly every government. Penalizing all companies and then only bailing out some is picking winners and losers.

> Penalizing all companies and then only bailing out some is picking winners and losers.

Without going into the semantics of the word, I will point out that yes, that is the role of the government. They provide incentives for certain behaviors, and lack of incentives (or even disincentives) for others.