Countries like Bermuda intentionally write their tax codes to be very attractive to large businesses who are concerned about taxes. If the countries who are missing out on their taxes had a way of preventing companies from doing all their business in Bermuda, they would... unless... large corporations had a strong influence on policy... hmm..

I would say naive, rather than incredibly stupid. One might expect companies that pride themselves on ethics and corporate citizenship to go along with the spirit of the law rather than the letter.

But I agree it's the government's responsibility to fix this.

--edit-- Two more things. Firstly avoiding does not really imply illegal. Evasion tends to be the illegal one.

Secondly, where google are concerned, there does seem to be some doubt over which country various sales activities could actually be said to have happened in, so there may be grounds for an investigation and they may be found to have been in contravention of the law.

Avoidance and evasion are much the same thing. If one implies negativity in this matter then so does the other. Reduction versus evasion is better to me.

If Google broke the law, then sure, punish them for it. At that point one can say they evaded paying their "fair share" of taxes and did not act in good faith.

Both can imply negativity while only one is illegal.

That's just the accepted legal term. By definition they both can be the same thing. When the law was written they could have just as easily as gone with tax avoidance as tax evasion.

But in the context of the discussion, avoiding taxes is being used in a negative way by implying that the companies are not paying taxes that they should be paying by whatever criteria society dreams up, such as "fair share". I simply object to this characterization since these companies are following the law until a tax court says otherwise.

> avoiding taxes is being used in a negative way

But that's an important point.

Traditionally "Tax evasion" was legal, and "tax avoidance" was normal, acceptable, and purely legal.

The weird accounting practices of some of these big firms are pushing a language change.

"Tax evasion" is clearly illegal.

"Tax planning" is clearly legal and acceptable.

"Tax avoidance" is using probably legal but weird methods to reduce (beyond any sensible amount) the tax burden of a company or very rich individual.