281–290 of 333 posts
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Just curious, how have you come by this experience? Does the irs release full audit rates?
Been in both situations and did a lot of research on what was possible negotiating. There is public information out there which they try to suppress (imagine if the public knew that the guy who owed 10 mill, got away paying 5 mill after years of not paying anything even after the IRS marked them).
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If a professional accountant told my buddy to do one weird trick to completely eliminate the lion's share of his tax liability, and he did it, and then the IRS went after him, I'd feel entirely comfortable judging both my buddy and his accountant, even if I didn't know the precise details.
Then you'd be judging a lot of people wrongly, because that sort of thing happens all the time for entirely legitimate reasons. For example, at various points there have been federal tax credits for installing solar panels on your house or buying certain types of green cars. For a lot of people the credit would exceed their federal tax liability for the year. You're prepared to send them all to jail for that without…
Doesn't almost every multinational use this arrangement, commonly known as the Double Irish? Why is Facebook getting called out specifically? Surprised the article doesn't mention this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement#Multi...
Regardless of any particular politics, they seem like a politically expedient target. Everybody hates them (while using their products, which is funny), and they aren't a big government contractor.
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Don’t you think if it were political they’d go after Twitter or Reddit who are stricter about suspending and banning accounts and so on?
Twitter has already banned political advertising, and Reddit simply doesn't have the audience that Facebook does (and being a pseudonymous platform is a different paradigm).
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If I understand right, US citizens only owe income tax if what they already paid is less than the US rate. (Edit: "IRS Form 1116. If your income was taxed by a foreign country, you can subtract that tax from your US tax") If something similar were applied to the tax on corporate profits, then it would not change much, as the US rate (21% I think) is pretty low by world standards. But there are exceptions, like Irelan…
"If I understand right, US citizens only owe income tax if what they already paid is less than the US rate." I'm not an expert, but my understanding is that unless there's a tax treaty specifying otherwise (which we do have with many countries), all personal income over the "foreign earned income exclusion" (roughly 100k) is subject to income tax just like US-derived income would be. (Edit: just saw your edit about F…
Here's another idea though: Arrange things so that the taxes owed depend on the goods sold, not on any ownership structure. Don't sell goods in the US? No problem. Sell mostly in the US? Who cares about your office in the Bahamas. This probably means abolishing the tax on corporate profits, as where these occurred seems to be basically an accounting fiction. Which is fine, we also don't tax windows anymore.
We changed the URL from https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/facebook-faces-tax-co... to one with the same text and no autoplaying video.
keep it up, dang ;)
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"If I understand right, US citizens only owe income tax if what they already paid is less than the US rate." I'm not an expert, but my understanding is that unless there's a tax treaty specifying otherwise (which we do have with many countries), all personal income over the "foreign earned income exclusion" (roughly 100k) is subject to income tax just like US-derived income would be. (Edit: just saw your edit about F…
I'm not sure it's so easy. If you own 51% of a company, which owns a slice of a company, which does business in America, does this grant uncle same the right to collect 5% of your profits? Sounds pretty imperial. Here's another idea though: Arrange things so that the taxes owed depend on the goods sold, not on any ownership structure. Don't sell goods in the US? No problem. Sell mostly in the US? Who cares about your…
Extradition is also imperial, but without it you effectively offer impunity to anyone who can get out of the country before they're caught. We don't offer this type of criminal impunity, so why are we offering tax impunity to the wealthiest and most powerful entities in the world?
The VAT idea is interesting and sounds a lot better than what we have now, but still seems like it could be subject to shell games in terms of what gets spent where. Wouldn't it also be extremely complex from a reporting perspective?
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Here's the million/billion/trillion dollar question: how much is a brand worth? Clearly it is worth something. Facebook can do the most inane thing, but if they put their brand on it then it will have some value. To me this is the flaw in corporate taxation. I don't think you can ever work around this as long as you allow free trade. It just makes sense to tax them in other ways instead and perhaps simply get rid of…
Could the US simply impose a tax on all corporate profits, including international profits, for any company with any sort of nexus or business activity in the US? US citizens are basically already treated this way as individuals. I imagine it would allow the rate to be drastically lower since the tax base would be so much larger. And while megacorps would obviously grumble, it would still be a profitable decision to…
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I think there's room to argue that intentionally shipping all your IP to a lower tax country then charging the main company (that developed that IP in the first place) high fees to use that IP as a way to shift profits from higher tax areas to lower tax areas could constitute fraud. Either they sold/transferred the IP for way to little or they're charging themselves way too much because it's advantageous for taxes.
Is there any good reason to treat subsidiaries as separate from the main entity for tax purposes? All these "subsidiary X licenses from subsidiary Y" schemes seem basically fraudulent in terms of common sense--none of it generates any real profits or losses for the parent company.
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Here's the million/billion/trillion dollar question: how much is a brand worth? Clearly it is worth something. Facebook can do the most inane thing, but if they put their brand on it then it will have some value. To me this is the flaw in corporate taxation. I don't think you can ever work around this as long as you allow free trade. It just makes sense to tax them in other ways instead and perhaps simply get rid of…
> how much is a brand worth? Clearly it is worth something. Facebook can do the most inane thing, but if they put their brand on it then it will have some value. Then, Toyota should only pay taxes in Japan? Or Volkswagen?