Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Uber used 50 Dutch shell companies to dodge taxes on $6B in revenue

businessinsider.com.au

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 431 posts

Re: Uber used 50 Dutch shell companies to dodge taxes on $6B in revenue

#241

Post by yxhuvud »

tiernano wrote: post #228

> Uber’s sophisticated efforts to achieve little or no tax burden on multibillion-dollar global revenues highlights a long-standing challenge governments face in enforcing tax compliance among wealthy corporations and individuals across borders. But... It's legal... None of it is illegal... They are compliant with the law... It's the law and the government's that need to change... Or am I missing something here?

If this is only hiding the potato in layers and layers of companies in different countries, then they have still paid less taxes than what they owe, which clearly is against the law and will generally require them to pay the missing taxes. If it is done through negligent reporting to tax authorities, then more laws may have been broken.

Re: Uber used 50 Dutch shell companies to dodge taxes on $6B in revenue

#243

Post by roenxi »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #182
bartart wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also worth noting that the top 1% pay about 40% of all income taxes at the federal level, and they earn about 20% of annual income from all sources ( http://hdr.undp.org/en/indicators/186106 ). So classifying 88% of federal revenue as paid by regular workers might be a bit misleading

99% of the top 1% are "normal workers" like me - engineers at Google - or my cousin - a radiologist - or one of my best friends - an investment banker - or lawyers, or owners of successful small businesses, etc... These "normal workers" pay a lot of that 40% of the tax bill. There aren't that many CEOs of Fortune 500 companies and board members, A+ list celebrities, and aristocrats. You're getting into the .01% - tha…

That article is saying top 1% income in the US is numbers higher than $400k! The median was something like $50k or $80k last time I checked. Those aren't normal workers, those are exactly there sort of people who are seen as not contributing their fair share. They physically can't be working harder than a median worker but they're getting multiples of the salary.

If someone is going to be supporting society, they are the people with the means.

Re: Uber used 50 Dutch shell companies to dodge taxes on $6B in revenue

#244

Post by Aunche »

onion2k wrote: post #240
Aunche wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Congress is corrupt (via lobbyists) The most a single company spent on lobbying last year was Facebook at $19.7 million, which is a whopping .17% of their marketing expenses. At the same time, they shelled out $130 million, forming a irrevocable trust to fund a supreme court of moderation decisions. If lobbying were really effective, Facebook would have given money to any Congressperson willing to make any decisions…

The most a single company spent on lobbying last year was Facebook at $19.7 million, which is a whopping .17% of their marketing expenses. In a thread about how a company used 50 shell companies to avoid millions in taxes it seems a little naive to suggest companies don't use similar tactics to fund lobbyists as well.

The shell companies are public information. How do you think researchers found them? Also, that implies that anyone bothers to look up lobbying spend in the first place, which clearly very few people do.

Re: Uber used 50 Dutch shell companies to dodge taxes on $6B in revenue

#245

Post by rjknight »

tiernano wrote: post #228

> Uber’s sophisticated efforts to achieve little or no tax burden on multibillion-dollar global revenues highlights a long-standing challenge governments face in enforcing tax compliance among wealthy corporations and individuals across borders. But... It's legal... None of it is illegal... They are compliant with the law... It's the law and the government's that need to change... Or am I missing something here?

Yes, this seems correct. This behaviour is "compliant" in the sense of "complying with the law", so calling it a "challenge... in enforcing tax compliance" seems straightforwardly wrong.

The tax laws allow this. Preventing it requires changing the law. If a government complains about this problem but doesn't try to change the law, then it's reasonable to ask if the government is truly serious about doing anything.

However, it's also true that this a difficult problem for governments to solve. Consider a company that has a head office in the US and factories in Indonesia, selling to customers in Europe and the US. Where should the corporate profits be taxed? Without the customers, there is no profit. Without the factories, there is no profit. Without the head office directing the whole thing, there is no profit. Which governments are entitled to a share of that? If the Indonesian subsidiary is "selling" the goods to the European and US branches and turning a profit, and the head office is "selling" its management services to both and turning a profit, and the retail arms are making profits on sales to end customers, then there might be taxes to pay in each jurisdiciton.

Now move the head office to a tax haven, and have the subsidiary units pay hefty IP licensing fees to the parent company - it seems that there are no taxable profits anywhere!

This seems obviously bad, but the amount of work involved in crafting a set of rules which prevent this is hard. Either there is a global corporate tax rate such that this kind of profit-shifting no longer makes sense, or there is some system for distinguishing between illegitimate profit-shifting (to a tax haven) and legitimate profit-shifting (profits accumulating with the parent company in the US rather than in the subsidiaries). Of course, perhaps the latter isn't legitimate either! European governments worried about FANG companies would be no happier if FANG paid heavy corporate taxes in the US if they continued to pay very little corporate tax in Europe, for instance.

So, I think government complaints about this are of the "this is too difficult for us to figure out and get international consensus on", so they resort to a kind of moral shaming, rather like the local priest shaming the town's wealthiest individuals for refusing to pay for repairs to the church roof.

Re: Uber used 50 Dutch shell companies to dodge taxes on $6B in revenue

#246

Post by extropy »

pjc50 wrote: post #233
0xy wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really hard to evade personal income tax, so why shouldn't the government just give up and tax corporations at 0%, while having high progressive personal income taxes? Or, better yet, proper sliding consumption taxes. If you want a yacht or private jet, pay 150% in taxes. Norway already taxes luxury cars at over 100% of their value.

This provides an even bigger shift to turn "income" into "capital gains". Or have your own personal shell corporation accumulate wealth and influence for you.

Yeah, just have your own theme park company, that manages your private mansion. All business expenses, you are just a janitor.

Re: Uber used 50 Dutch shell companies to dodge taxes on $6B in revenue

#247

Post by tomnipotent »

lovich wrote: post #180
bartart wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also worth noting that the top 1% pay about 40% of all income taxes at the federal level, and they earn about 20% of annual income from all sources ( http://hdr.undp.org/en/indicators/186106 ). So classifying 88% of federal revenue as paid by regular workers might be a bit misleading

Did 100% of the wealth generated by the 1% come from their income taxed at that rate, or did they have a significant portion of their generated wealth come from capital gains? Classifying the 1%'s wealth by talking about their income as if its 100% of their wealth might be a bit misleading.

> might be a bit misleading

Does wealth matter when you're talking about taxes? I was under the impression "1%" was in reference to share of adjusted gross income, not total wealth.

Re: Uber used 50 Dutch shell companies to dodge taxes on $6B in revenue

#248

Post by tomnipotent »

roenxi wrote: post #243
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

99% of the top 1% are "normal workers" like me - engineers at Google - or my cousin - a radiologist - or one of my best friends - an investment banker - or lawyers, or owners of successful small businesses, etc... These "normal workers" pay a lot of that 40% of the tax bill. There aren't that many CEOs of Fortune 500 companies and board members, A+ list celebrities, and aristocrats. You're getting into the .01% - tha…

That article is saying top 1% income in the US is numbers higher than $400k! The median was something like $50k or $80k last time I checked. Those aren't normal workers, those are exactly there sort of people who are seen as not contributing their fair share. They physically can't be working harder than a median worker but they're getting multiples of the salary. If someone is going to be supporting society, they are…

> Those aren't normal workers

What's your definition of a normal worker? Lawyers, doctors, dentists, pilots, architects and programmers sound like normal workers to me.

This is still millions of people, and I imagine they would think they're normal workers, too. But Fortune 500 CEOs? Well, there's only... 500. Even the combined payroll of the MLB, NBA, NHL, NFL, and MLS is less than 10,000 professional athletes where median pay is $860k, $1.15M, and $8.3M for the NFL, MLB, and NBA respectively.

Re: Uber used 50 Dutch shell companies to dodge taxes on $6B in revenue

#249

Post by johannes1234321 »

seaourfreed wrote: post #93

Congress is corrupt (via lobbyists). Congress would make this illegal if congress men/women didn't sell out American Citizens. 88% of the cost of the US Fed gov is paid for by taxes by workers (income taxes). Less than 12% comes from all corp/business taxes combined with capital gains (taxing the rich 1%). Business shifting tax burden to workers is a massive scale problem. $3.5 Trillion = US Tax Revenues (2019) and 8…

Actually the EU would have to act here. The EU should ensure that revenues made in the EU are taxed in the EU. However that would require all member states to agree and for countries like Ireland or Netherlands it is better to earn 1% of all EU profits of those companies than "proper" tax rates on only parts of the revenue, thus they won't agree ...

Re: Uber used 50 Dutch shell companies to dodge taxes on $6B in revenue

#250

Post by CryptoPunk »

flukus wrote: post #190
CryptoPunk wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we don't have a moral right to appropriate unclaimed and abundant natural resources, then we don't have a moral right to our body. Our common sense, which favors functional societies, sees the granting of a right to appropriate unclaimed and abundant natural resources to reconfigure it into higher value economic resources for our own exclusive use, as just.

> Our common sense, which favors functional societies, sees the granting of a right to appropriate unclaimed and abundant natural resources to reconfigure it into higher value economic resources for our own exclusive use, as just. Just as our common sense, which favors functional societies, sees taxation as just. But just because we see something as useful and just doesn't mean there is an inherent moral underpinning…

>>Just as our common sense, which favors functional societies, sees taxation as just.

Our commen sense has nothing to do with support for income taxation. The system of taxation is too complex, and has too many intermediaries, for the typical person to fully assess it in all of its moral dimensions.

If it were laid bare, without layers of intermediaries obfuscating its nature, and a multitude of ideological and political rhetoric to euphemize it, I believe the vast majority of people would perceive it the same way they would perceive one party, walking up to another, and demanding he hand over half the items he received in trade for the day, or be beaten up.

>>Maybe we don't have this inherent right?

I think that given this belief arises naturally in all social animals, it is a highly functional belief for social groups, and therefore it is in fact inherent to existence as a sentient social being.

Post reply on HN