Very interesting concept. This happens with lawsuits. If you have enough money/assets to be an attractive target for a lawsuit, but you don’t have enough to pay to defend the lawsuit, you are also “unprotected prey”.

An example: in SF/LA (California), a decent civil litigator will cost about $400+/hr. And a lawsuit will run for 1-3 years. When you add all the legal costs up, it turns out that just to defend yourself, you’ll need to spend about $100-$200k. So, unless you have quite a bit of money, you’ll have to either default or settle in maybe not very favorable terms. Either way, you might end up bankrupt, in debt for a long time, or just with no savings at all.

I'd love to see some data on how big a deal this really is, because I would normally assume that by the time you've reached the levels of wealth we're talking about, "tax assistance" is a trivial expense.

I think at this level, tax protection isn't 'hiring a decent accountant' or 'donate $10,000 to charity', but instead is 'moving your base of operations off-shore' and things like that. Things you can do with a ten-million dollar income, but not a half-million.

Yes. And the reason for that is the cost of lawyers to setup and run the structure. Lawyers could actually charge less and open access to more people, but then it wouldn’t be as exclusive.