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Activision Blizzard has moved billions of dollars of profit into tax havens

taxwatchuk.org

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Re: Activision Blizzard has moved billions of dollars of profit into tax havens

#191

Post by Scoundreller »

FireBeyond wrote: post #156
Scoundreller wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could see it now. Starbucks develops a "new brew". They fly the best coffee connoisseurs to a Liberian-flagged, Korean-built ship sailing from Saipan to Nauru, and develop a new formula there with equal parts Arabic beans and Robusta beans. They sell this new product worldwide, with marketing from a PR team domiciled in Malta, but operating in the Netherlands. Where was the value created?

Blizzard's programmers develop a game in the US. It's hosted on US servers. It has an in-game currency system/DLC system, also hosted in the US, and processes card transactions in the US. However, at the same time, they claim that the entity that runs the DLC purchase system is in Malta, where Blizzard has no employees, but uses an outside legal and accounting firm. They claim all the value is in Malta. I tend to dis…

I don’t think any reasonable person disagrees.

We should send tax cases to juries for decisions.

Re: Activision Blizzard has moved billions of dollars of profit into tax havens

#192

Post by phs318u »

FDSGSG wrote: post #6

It's downright ridiculous to complain about companies taking perfectly legal steps to reduce their tax burden. As the oft-quoted US judge Learned Hand said: > Anyone may arrange his affairs so that his taxes shall be as low as possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which best pays the treasury. There is not even a patriotic duty to increase one's taxes. Over and over again the Courts have said that there is…

> Everyone does it, rich and poor alike

No they don’t. Even if a “poor person” wanted to, they have nowhere near the scope available to “arrange their affairs” such that they can minimise their taxes at the same percentage (of income) as the rich do. To believe otherwise is naive in the extreme.

Re: Activision Blizzard has moved billions of dollars of profit into tax havens

#193

Post by adventured »

coldtea wrote: post #188
CountSessine wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that a semi-ironic joke? The elite in theocracies have plenty of money. https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/iransource/rage-agains... The big difference is that the elite here invent crazy-useful shit like online-shopping or iPhones or map-reduce. The elite in a theocracy or military dictatorship accomplish and contribute nothing.

> The big difference is that the elite here invent crazy-useful shit like online-shopping or iPhones or map-reduce. No elite ever invented any such things. Engineers working for the elites (and getting shit all for their invention most of the times) did. Same way the Pharaohs didn't built the pyramids themselves...

> No elite ever invented any such things.

That's very easy to disprove as a claim. Engineers in the US and elsewhere routinely get very wealthy from companies they found or are involved with and their inventions.

Robert Noyce invented the first practical integrated circuit and was quite wealthy. As a brilliant engineer he co-founded both Intel and Fairchild. There's probably nobody in the history of the semiconductor industry that had a greater impact. He's a big part of the reason Silicon Valley exists. Gordon Moore was another talented engineer along with Noyce and a co-founder of Intel (resulting in a ~$20b fortune).

Ray Dolby was a brilliant engineer that became a billionaire from his inventions and eponymous company.

Linus Torvalds, a very skilled engineer, created Linux and is now quite wealthy. He was a self-made millionaire in his 30s.

Thomas Edison was both relatively rich and a very prolific inventor.

George Westinghouse was a very skilled engineer as well as a prolific inventor and became extremely wealthy.

James Dyson is both an inventor and extraordinarily rich.

Robin Li was a skilled engineer and helped pioneer search engines.

John Carmack and Tim Sweeney are both inventors and rich (extraordinarily rich in the case of Sweeney).

Larry Page invented PageRank, which was a critical shift in the way search engines work versus all the existing peers at the time. It was in fact the very foundation of Google's dominance.

Bill Gates started the first software company. It's easy to argue he didn't invent much, however he did help blaze the trail of software as an industry unto itself.

Larry Ellison - a skilled engineer - along with his co-founders, launched one of the first relational database products.

The founders of Cisco were both skilled engineers and got very wealthy from their ownership (despite conflicting with the VCs and being tossed out later).

Steve Wozniak was both a very skilled engineer, an inventor, and someone who got relatively wealthy.

Paul Allen was both an inventor, skilled engineer and someone who got extraordinarily rich.

Jensen Huang was a skilled engineer and got extremely wealthy by founding nVidia.

Robert Metcalfe, a talented engineer that co-invented ethernet, got wealthy from 3Com and various companies he was involved with over the years.

Andy Bechtolsheim was a very talented engineer that became wealthy from Sun Microsystems, Arista and investments.

Marc Andreessen was an engineer that helped to co-create Mosaic and went on to found Netscape. Few people did more to spark Internet adoption than Andreessen's early browsers.

James Clark was a skilled engineer that founded Silicon Graphics.

Pierre Omidyar was a skilled engineer and helped write the early code for eBay, which was one of the first online auction sites.

This list keeps going. These people all fall into the "elite" category and they're all engineers.

Re: Activision Blizzard has moved billions of dollars of profit into tax havens

#194

Post by 55555 »

FDSGSG wrote: post #61
ravitation wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Settling a tax dispute with $345 million owed is indicative of doing something wrong. It's different than you just being audited. At best it's indicative of bad accounting, but for a company like Activision Blizzard and at that amount that seems unlikely.

Not really, taxation at this level is extremely complex. $345 million could just be because of unclear phrasing.

It's kind of a joke though, isn't it? Like, Blizzard isn't doing any real work in Barbados or Bermuda. So you could probably argue it's wrong, unless you feel like arguing that all taxation is wrong from an Individualist perspective (which I'd be fine with).

And aside from wrong, the fact that they've agreed to pay a fine of $345 million means it was probably illegal. If they just phrased something wrong they could probably just correct the phrasing, and, more importantly, I think they probably tried really hard to get the phrasing right when transferring billions from one company to another.

I own offshore companies and minimize my tax burden, but let's call a spade a spade.

Re: Activision Blizzard has moved billions of dollars of profit into tax havens

#195

Post by TAForObvReasons »

Fnoord wrote: post #124
FDSGSG wrote: post #6

It's downright ridiculous to complain about companies taking perfectly legal steps to reduce their tax burden. As the oft-quoted US judge Learned Hand said: > Anyone may arrange his affairs so that his taxes shall be as low as possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which best pays the treasury. There is not even a patriotic duty to increase one's taxes. Over and over again the Courts have said that there is…

> It's downright ridiculous to complain about companies taking perfectly legal steps to reduce their tax burden. How ironic that you had to post (as of now) 24 times in this very thread defending this condescending viewpoint. You're not at all addressing what the article mentions. I'll address what the article mentions. The article (quite clearly, in bold) mentions, at the top: > The company is currently under invest…

This effect is not limited to the EU. US suffers a similar problem with the GOP actively trying to shrink the IRS budget, even though it has an incredible ROI (estimated at >$4 for every dollar spent) https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/01/business/economy/irs-tax-... discusses in further detail

Re: Activision Blizzard has moved billions of dollars of profit into tax havens

#196

Post by ghostpepper »

phs318u wrote: post #192
FDSGSG wrote: post #6

It's downright ridiculous to complain about companies taking perfectly legal steps to reduce their tax burden. As the oft-quoted US judge Learned Hand said: > Anyone may arrange his affairs so that his taxes shall be as low as possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which best pays the treasury. There is not even a patriotic duty to increase one's taxes. Over and over again the Courts have said that there is…

> Everyone does it, rich and poor alike No they don’t. Even if a “poor person” wanted to, they have nowhere near the scope available to “arrange their affairs” such that they can minimise their taxes at the same percentage (of income) as the rich do. To believe otherwise is naive in the extreme.

I think OP was referring to the act of arranging one's affairs to make their taxes as low as possible, and not the ultimate reduction in tax rate achieved.

Re: Activision Blizzard has moved billions of dollars of profit into tax havens

#197

Post by TAForObvReasons »

coldtea wrote: post #186
hartator wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why tax something that provides only positive value without using local ressources.

For one, because we don't tax to "punish" (e.g. use of local resources) or to encourage, but to create a pool of money our governments can use for country-wide works, defense funding, and so on.

To be fair, our sales, income, and wealth tax policies also reflect our societal values. Some jurisdictions tax sugary drinks partly as an attempt to "punish" or reduce consumption.

Re: Activision Blizzard has moved billions of dollars of profit into tax havens

#198

Post by HNisCurated »

devwastaken wrote: post #8
FDSGSG wrote: post #6

It's downright ridiculous to complain about companies taking perfectly legal steps to reduce their tax burden. As the oft-quoted US judge Learned Hand said: > Anyone may arrange his affairs so that his taxes shall be as low as possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which best pays the treasury. There is not even a patriotic duty to increase one's taxes. Over and over again the Courts have said that there is…

Legal /=/ moral

Considering blizzard kills less humans than the United States government, legal and moral?

Re: Activision Blizzard has moved billions of dollars of profit into tax havens

#199

Post by thaumasiotes »

adventured wrote: post #193
coldtea wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The big difference is that the elite here invent crazy-useful shit like online-shopping or iPhones or map-reduce. No elite ever invented any such things. Engineers working for the elites (and getting shit all for their invention most of the times) did. Same way the Pharaohs didn't built the pyramids themselves...

> No elite ever invented any such things. That's very easy to disprove as a claim. Engineers in the US and elsewhere routinely get very wealthy from companies they found or are involved with and their inventions. Robert Noyce invented the first practical integrated circuit and was quite wealthy. As a brilliant engineer he co-founded both Intel and Fairchild. There's probably nobody in the history of the semiconductor…

> Bill Gates started the first software company.

...?

Re: Activision Blizzard has moved billions of dollars of profit into tax havens

#200

Post by thaumasiotes »

oconnor663 wrote: post #106
mattmanser wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it's not. That's how change happens. It's still perfectly legal to destroy the environment in many ways, it doesn't mean we can't complain about it. If we don't talk about it, nothing happens.

No one designed the environment to be destroyed. But tax laws are often designed precisely to incentivize people to behave in a certain way. If we raise taxes on cigarettes, and then people smoke less, and tax revenue goes down, does anyone complain? Of course not; that's why we raised taxes on cigarettes. Now sometimes you have tax laws that are poorly designed, where we don't like what happens when people follow th…

> If we raise taxes on cigarettes, and then people smoke less, and tax revenue goes down, does anyone complain? Of course not; that's why we raised taxes on cigarettes.

In this exact scenario, people complain all the time. They start talking about how we need to raise other taxes to make up for the new shortfall in cigarette-related revenue.

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