Such rules only act as an incentive to find new loopholes and waist money using them. A large company can spend 99% of what they save in taxes to find out how to save it and its a net gain.

The solution would be to have absolute minimalist tax rules which are so simple that there wont be loopholes. Then also make judges apply common sense and smash every attempted loophole until everyone stops wasting money to find one.

Never going to happen obviously but we can dream.

The issue with this is that tax code is often used as a proxy to fix all sorts of social problems that lead to inequality. We give tax breaks to subsets of populations who really need them. We also push policy through tax incentives, for example solar related deductions.

I think we'd be better off fixing the deduction of such problems, but just pointing out that part of the reason taxes are so complicated are to enable this. Another reason is to create corporate tax loopholes...

Subsidizing anything should never be done trough tax breaks anyway. It just hides tax spending. Also this was about corporate taxes not private taxes. If a corporation "really needs a tax cut" its probably just unsustainable and if not it should find investors to bring the money voluntary not force spend the peoples money.

Yes the loopholes are intentional but it only helps very few individuals and a whole industry of layer, while corporations aren't actually in the business of finding tax loopholes they are indirectly forced to participate anyway because their competitor does. People blame the companies for evading taxes but they are not the problem they have to play along because everything else would be hard to explain to the shareholders.

Imagine if you are a business owner and your company slowly grows to amazon size. At what point would a sane person like to pay people to evade taxes? You would never want to do that instead of building a team of tax specialist or outsource that you could expand in real business. Your local small business owner and Jeff Bezos both have no interest in that.

Voilà! Amazon Legal Services LLC (no connection to Amazon.com Inc. ;), now provides all legal services to Amazon.com Inc.

This doesn’t work at all, many companies don’t have lawyers of their own but keep big law firms on retainer. And companies could just offload more onto JD-advantage employees/ law student interns anyways since they’re not “lawyers”

They have both in-house counsels and work with external law firms. A reason for doing this is to avoid liability.

Some big companies retain multiple law firms and ask the same advice a couple of times. If an overworked attorney who barely gets any sleep ever misses a point or drafts his/her advice vaguely in a way that would enable their evil plans, they rely on that single opinion. If there are any problems they don't assume any liability, because hey they got a legal opinion from a respectable law firm. Nobody needs to know/can prove they obtained multiple opinions on the same matter because of legal privilege.

In return, big law gets paid a lot of $$$, because of the risk of providing such opinions under considerable pressure and trickstery.

Having a legal opinion supporting an aggressive tax position that is eventually overturned doesn’t get you out of liability for that position. The appearance of food faith efforts to comply with the complex tax code may reduce penalties assessed.

Sure, my comment wasn't tax code specific. There is always risk involved, but it's much less. If you need to do it anyway, better pressure a lawyer into giving you a legal opinion. The company will pay pay the fine but who can blame you for acting on it.

In a big corp, I think most employees are concerned with saving the day. If the management pressures them to cut corners most will. What better way is there to pass the blame?

They'd just outsource them to a legal firm