The meat: > Last year, French media outlet La Lettre reported that until 2021, Netflix in France minimised its tax payments by declaring its turnover generated in France to the Netherlands. > investigators are trying to determine whether Netflix continued to attempt to minimise its profits after 2021. Wasn't Uber or some other US company found doing something similar? First they were found to be in violation of some…
Yeah there's the so called "Dutch Sandwich"[1] which is a well-known tax "planning" methodology that corporates use with the so called "Double Irish" being another one. There's also a slightly less-well known one involving Mauritius and India. They're all ways of moving profits between companies in order to exploit tax treaties that countries put in place. In the case of the Dutch sandwich I think the Netherlands has…
Moreover, tax authorities have increasingly taken the position that the use of these planning methods constitutes tax evasion. The Dutch Sandwich and Double Irish were grandfathered in (meaning, not treated as criminal tax evasion) but a company utilizing similar schemes today would ultimately result in one or more of their executives spending time in jail.
Critically, most of tax law is actually regulation that implements statutes. Tax planning schemes that satisfy the technical letter of regulations but which violate the plain intent of the written statute can, and have, been deemed illegal years or even decades later (see, for example, the Bermudan tax loss harvesting scheme), and this has repeatedly passed constitutional muster.