[ui-explorer12]

tax evasion is illegal; tax minimization is lowering your tax burden using existing laws and is not illegal.

Governments should reduce the number of unintentional loopholes but (a) it's far easier to pass new laws than amend old ones, (b) if you change a law that an existing big domestic firm or voting block is exploiting they will let you know at the polls; with a new law you can sell it as "balanced fiscal justice - righting a great wrong by making big foreign multinationals pay their fair share!"

I'm definitely not against tax reform, my big concern is the common approach of new taxes as political theater without any honest attempt at simplification, broad application or coordination with other jurisdictions. All this tax is doing is targeting a small, low-vote target that will figure out a complicated way to shift taxable revenue into a different jurisdiction, perpetuating the exact problem it supposedly addresses.

[grumpydba]

> Governments should reduce the number of unintentional loopholes

They are intentional. Source: tax lawyer friends.

[josefx]

> without any honest attempt at simplification, broad application or coordination with other jurisdictions.

The problem with that is that the other jurisdictions have no interest in closing tax loopholes. The irish bend over backwards to let Apples unique sheme qualify as double irish (their tax office had to issue several private rulings) and they had no interest in getting rid of the double irish itself either. For a tax haven making even a cent in taxes they wouldn't have otherwise gotten while costing a different country a million is a win.

[diarmuidc]

The double Irish was gotten rid of in 2015 https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/double-irish-with-a-dut...

[microcolonel]

You can see the impact of that crackdown in their tax receipts and tax to GDP ratio. Government revenue from Double Irish tax arrangements was fully 5% of their GDP.

https://data.oecd.org/tax/tax-revenue.htm

[josefx]

For every company already using it "will be", in 2020. Enough time to migrate to the next trick.

[BurningFrog]

> The problem with that is that the other jurisdictions have no interest in closing tax loopholes.

A lot of people see that as a feature. "Competitive governance" may be the biggest reason the world works as well as it does.

[josefx]

I could live in a world with a little less tax avoidance by the rich. So in this case I don't see the upside to a country violating long standing trade deals to make a little more on the side.