Re:The public has a right to know how companies that pay no ...
by 908B64B197 on Tuesday November 03, 2020 @12:06PM
(#24981501)
> My intuition is that if I personally came up with a cute "gotcha" like this where I wound up paying zero in taxes because of some loophole, I would go to prison. Why isn't the same standard applied to rich companies?
Because the tax code is relatively simple for W2 employees. Not so much for corporations.
> "You're technically owned by an Irish company you invented to avoid taxes? Cool. The c-suite plus your accountants are going to prison for the next five years and we're seizing the X billion you actually owe plus a punitive fine."
It gets doubly complicated once you cross borders, because transferring assets like that might be legal under some treaty between country A and B.
Truth is, if society doesn't want these practices to be legal it has to write a tax code that doesn't make them legal.
Because the tax code is relatively simple for W2 employees. Not so much for corporations.
> "You're technically owned by an Irish company you invented to avoid taxes? Cool. The c-suite plus your accountants are going to prison for the next five years and we're seizing the X billion you actually owe plus a punitive fine."
It gets doubly complicated once you cross borders, because transferring assets like that might be legal under some treaty between country A and B.
Truth is, if society doesn't want these practices to be legal it has to write a tax code that doesn't make them legal.