from Hacker News

The world is becoming less welcoming to tax dodgers

by olliepop on 11/15/15, 8:16 PM with 106 comments

• by vixen99 on 11/16/15, 2:55 PM

  Let's be careful with terms. Dodging is avoiding - generally thought to be a sensible activity.

  'No man in the country is under the smallest obligation, moral or other, so to arrange his legal relations to his business or property as to enable the Inland Revenue to put the largest possible shovel in his stores. The Inland Revenue is not slow, and quite rightly, to take every advantage which is open to it under the Taxing Statutes for the purposes of depleting the taxpayer's pocket. And the taxpayer is in like manner entitled to be astute to prevent, so far as he honestly can, the depletion of his means by the Inland Revenue'

  Lord Clyde: Ayrshire Pullman Motor Services v Inland Revenue [1929] 14 Tax Case 754, at 763,764:

• by klausjensen on 11/16/15, 3:29 PM

  Link to the underlying report, this story is based on:

  http://www.financialsecrecyindex.com/introduction/fsi-2015-r...

  ...Something I think the journalists should have done in the story, btw.

• by jensen123 on 11/16/15, 4:51 PM

  I have an old book here - The International Man by Doug Casey, which was published in 1978. It lists the tax rates for several countries. For example, the income tax went up to 75% in Japan, 71% in the Netherlands, 70% in Norway, 55% in Singapore, 80% in Sweden, 83% in the UK, 70% in the US and 56% in West-Germany.

  I'm wondering if maybe there might be a correlation between unreasonably high taxes and tax havens? If the tax rate is reasonable, say 20-30%, then I probably won't bother trying to evade taxes myself and I won't have much sympathy with others doing it (greedy assholes!). However, if the tax rate is like 70-80%, then yeah, putting some money in a tax haven becomes tempting and I will have much sympathy with other tax dodgers.

• by lumberjack on 11/16/15, 3:46 PM

  The reason being? My guess is governments are finding it hard to balance their budgets since many economies are performing short of what they predicted pre-2008.

• by fleitz on 11/16/15, 5:29 PM

  Here in Canada even the Revenue Agency dodges taxes.

  http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/federal-pension-board-used-o...

• by comrh on 11/16/15, 4:14 PM

  Aren't taxes a zero sum game? If one "dodges" any amount the state must make up that revenue somewhere so the actors with finances and ability to best take advantage of the system then end up not paying their fair share?

• by snake_plissken on 11/16/15, 6:25 PM

  I read an interesting piece the other day. It posited that the true goal of mass data collection programs like those run by the NSA and GCHQ is not to stop terrorism but to gather information and track financial transactions so that more taxes could be collected. I think the only piece of evidence supporting the supposition was the fact that the data will be kept "forever", so it wasn't the most convincing piece, but I liked the unorthodox nature of the idea. I think it was on ZeroHedge but I can't find it at the moment.

• by eip on 11/16/15, 6:57 PM

  "When the government is able to collect tax and seize private property without just compensation, it is an indication that the public is ripe for surrender and is consenting to enslavement and legal encroachment. A good and easily quantified indicator of harvest time is the number of public citizens who pay income tax despite an obvious lack of reciprocal or honest service from the government."

• by gtpasqual on 11/16/15, 4:02 PM

  Sorry to break it to you, but tax evasion will always exist.

  There is a HUGE financial incentive to find alternatives and a simple example would be cryptocurrencies.

• by Chrossler on 11/16/15, 3:00 PM

  I don't like taxes either... That's why i just don't pay them