[FollowSteph3]

Although great in theory how do you collect the pay the taxes for revenues collected in every country? A big business like Google can handle this but a smaller business will be crushed by it. Imagine a 1-2 person. Imagine a 1-2 person business selling online. Are they capable of paying taxes in a hundred countries? That burden alone would crush them. Try managing the tax rules for 100 countries as a 1-2 person shop. Good luck.

Ignoring that who will enforce it? If say a Russian owes taxes to the US how will they get the payment if the person doesn't want to pay?

But even then why should the taxes go to that country? All the infrastructure to allow your business to operate in the first place is in your country. The roads to get your employees to work etc.

That being said if your going to open factories or offices in another country than I believe you should be required to have a corporation in that country and pay taxes in that country for the revenues those entities make. But even that is challenging. It's honestly a very hard issue to resolve...

[FollowSteph3]

Also just to add to the complexity what happens for online websites. If you're from Australia and visit Google and the server is in the US and you click on an ad, the a houldnt the revenue, and hence taxes, be paid in the US because the server is located in the US. That's were the revenue was made. Assuming that's true then wherever you host the server is where you should be taxed. And in that case certain countries would be more beneficial to put your hosting servers in.

Basically all I'm saying is that it's not an easy problem and there are no easy and obvious answers :(

[MR4D]

I up-voted this because it highlights the legal issue so clearly to any of us techies.

Clearly the tax has to be paid somewhere, and I'll bet every jurisdiction has an argument why theirs is the right place to collect it. No wonder tax or trade treaties take so long to negotiate.

[mhenr18]

> Try managing the tax rules for 100 countries as a 1-2 person shop. Good luck.

The same justification could be made for accepting international credit card payments online, but companies like Stripe are happy to provide you with a service that takes away the hassle. If they can do that, then I'd say they would be perfectly willing to solve the local tax problem for you.