Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you have it backwards. The biggest companies that are already avoiding taxes can justify the lawyer costs to do it again. Besides, they typically already have dozens of subsidiaries that are largely invisible to most employees and business partners. This is just adding more reasons to do so. (Source: have worked on subsidiary taxonomy of large companies before, not for tax purposes, and from the outside there…
You know how your bank is required to report any transaction to FinCEN in excess of $10,000 on what's called a CTR, or currency transaction report? Some enterprising criminals decided to break up their deposits into two $5000 transactions to avoid this. So naturally, they made that a crime called structuring [1]. I don't see why it wouldn't be illegal to break up your company into a thousand subsidiaries to evade tax…
It could be illegal, but this isn't the same as comparing a few timestamps. You'd need to dive into WHY the subsidiaries exist to determine that they weren't "legal" structures.
> Even if you asked them, it wouldn't be hard to come up with legal reasons
And as I said, they might be! There are probably many reasons to split up an organization that aren't CURRENTLY worth the effort. But this suddenly makes it worth the effort and they already have the justification.
The details of what these justifications are can be interesting, but are largely specific to each entity. Here is one general example: if you have a business presence in every state, boom, 50 subsidiaries already there. Come up with a few other bogus reasons and you can easily rack up entirely legal subsidiaries that on the surface, seem like intelligent organizational choices.