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The CumEx-Files – How Europe's taxpayers have been swindled of €55B

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Re: The CumEx-Files – How Europe's taxpayers have been swindled of €55B

#41

Post by mikorym »

GeneralMayhem wrote: post #8
Reason077 wrote: post #2

”Tax payers have lost up to €2 billion, that’s nearly €350,000 for every Danish man, woman and child.” You sure about that math, cumex-files?

Possibly confusion by someone who's used to the long scale? In Danish, as in most non-English European languages, the cognate of "billion" means trillion (10^12).

Afrikaans also uses the long system.

"miljoen" -> "miljard" -> "biljoen" -> "biljard" -> "triljoen"

^6 -> ^9 -> ^12 -> ^15 -> ^18

However, a lot of Afrikaans-speaking people use the de facto English convention. The newspapers usually get it right though, in contrast to this article.

Re: The CumEx-Files – How Europe's taxpayers have been swindled of €55B

#42

Post by pfortuny »

sharpneli wrote: post #32
pfortuny wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

57.000.0000.000€ is not so much for a tax-evading scheme in the whole of Europe? Or is it...

It’s not tax evasion. It’s receiving tax refunds from taxes that never were paid. This time it actually is pure theft.

Yes, sorry. My bad. This is much worse... what a shame.

Re: The CumEx-Files – How Europe's taxpayers have been swindled of €55B

#43

Post by zoobab »

sparkling wrote: post #23

The missing transparancy disclaimer: "The Cumex files" is headed by "Correctiv", a german based "journalist network" which receives large parts of its funding by german goverment organizations and/or organizations which have close gov connections. But: the german goverment itself was aware of this scheme since at least 2002. Also: this is a drop in the ocean compared to EU-internal tax loop holes and tax havens such…

"EU-internal tax loop holes" such as the well known tax reductions on patent/copyright/design/etc royalties, which are still 0% in the Netherlands:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_Sandwich

Re: The CumEx-Files – How Europe's taxpayers have been swindled of €55B

#44

Post by skummetmaelk »

flexie wrote: post #19
Reason077 wrote: post #2

”Tax payers have lost up to €2 billion, that’s nearly €350,000 for every Danish man, woman and child.” You sure about that math, cumex-files?

Danish tax payers have lost around EUR 1.7B. That's around EUR 300 for every Dane. Still a lot, but a lot less than they claim. I have two takes on this: 1: The Danish tax authorities have been extremely careless in the administration of the rules. They didn't even check that the people owned the shares they claimed to own. Virtually all of it was approved by one employee with zero oversight. 2: Different internation…

The Danish tax disaster has a long history beginning in the early 00's when it was decided to reform and digitalize the tax collection. Contractors were brought in to develop a nation-wide tax collection system that would reduce the cost of collecting tax. This system was to take many years to develop and a plan was made to gradually lay off employees in the tax collection agency as the system was made ready so that there would not be a massive excess of employees when the system was released.

Of course the system was delayed.. by years... And there were fewer experienced employees available because the lay-off policy was to let people retire as normal, but just stop hiring.

When the system finally was released, the tax collection service was in dire straits. Layoffs had continued, experience was lost. Employees were doing the work of 3 people without really knowing how and having noone to ask for advice. To top it off, it was politically decided to decentralise the tax collection service and split the offices into many small units across the country. Causing even more people to quit.

This isn't the end though. The system was released all right, but it was quickly discovered that it was making illegal tax collections from citizens due to faulty property evaluation. Attempts were made to fix the system, but it was SCRAPPED AFTER TWO YEARS.

Now we are left with a broken tax collection agency which cannot perform its duties and lacks manpower to verify tax claims from companies knowingly exploiting the situation.

Re: The CumEx-Files – How Europe's taxpayers have been swindled of €55B

#45

Post by chvid »

Certhas wrote: post #37
chvid wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From observing this story in the danish media, there is a lot of fishiness about it. The numbers are just too big for it to make sense. And I would not be surprised to see some of it coming down to the lack of math skills (or what you call it?) amongst journalists. How can anyone arrive at a result like that and not look one more time at their calculation? Embarrassing really. With all the fuzz about Sanjay (the alle…

That embarrassing error of a factor 1000 aside, the story is all to real. It's been brewing and been reported on in Germany for a few years now. And what seems to be a common theme is that some of what has been going on is very hard to prosecute. The first wave of tricks seems to have been basically legal if I recall correctly. I haven't read the new slew of articles about the EU dimension on this yet though.

I have no doubt that there are elements of the story that are correct. But the shocking part of the story is the size of the amounts and the poor reporting by what should be an ace journalistic team coupled with common sense makes me doubt that the scale is correct.

Plus the recent the story that Sanjay was put in jail due to a rubber check. Doesn’t sound like a guy who just got away with 1 B euros.

Re: The CumEx-Files – How Europe's taxpayers have been swindled of €55B

#47

Post by lotsofpulp »

collyw wrote: post #39
NeedMoreTea wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As it did in British English until, I guess, some time in the 80s or 90s after the Treasury decided to standardise on the US format (edit: apparently that was in 1975). Like with metrication us Brits adopted it slowly so there were many years of seeing either usage. This wasn't confusing at all. :)

I think there is a mathematical definition and a financial definition of a "billion".

In the US, there is only one meaning for billion. Thousands (10^3), millions (10^6), billions (10^9), trillions (10^12), quadrillions (10^15), etc. And 99% of people would have never heard of milliard or billiard or any other -ard.

Re: The CumEx-Files – How Europe's taxpayers have been swindled of €55B

#48

Post by m12k »

This reminds me of the way most application developers aren't security experts, and it's taken decades with a lot of very public hacks for awareness about the risks to be spread and for a set of security practices and middleware to evolve (hashed & salted passwords, CSRF mitigation, input sanitation, etc.), to make it feasible for normal developers to create reasonably secure applications. It seems something similar needs to happen in tax administration (and tax law) to make tax systems that are not exploitable. Maybe a new class of white-hats to "pen-test" the tax systems using loopholes and shell companies instead of 0-days and scanners?

Re: The CumEx-Files – How Europe's taxpayers have been swindled of €55B

#49

Post by raffael-vogler »

Reason077 wrote: post #2

”Tax payers have lost up to €2 billion, that’s nearly €350,000 for every Danish man, woman and child.” You sure about that math, cumex-files?

The quote in the English text is:

"In Denmark, journalists and the authorities are also investigating the cum-ex trades. Tax payers have lost up to €2 billion * , that’s nearly €350 for every Danish man, woman and child."

That's correct - mathwise.

*: https://translate.google.com/#en/de/billion

Re: The CumEx-Files – How Europe's taxpayers have been swindled of €55B

#50

Post by PythonicAlpha »

The German government did know about this stuff I think from 2002 or 2001 on, but still did not stop it until around 2012 in Germany and did not warn other countries, so it went on in those.

I just can not understand, how the government of my country could work this way. It really borders to actively supporting this scam.

In my opinion, not only the people that have done this (including many banks!), but also responsible persons in the government or ministries should take responsibilities.

But in Germany, if you are big enough or in government, you can do nearly everything without effects.

Banks already have looted the people of many countries in 2008/2009.

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