| > Couldn't we just ban tax evasion? What makes it so hard? (honest question) Two things, mostly. The first is lack of financial transparency. The other is how corporate tax is levied. With respect to transparency, there's no shortage of options to create structures in tax havens such that there's little if any paper trail that ties it to their owners or beneficiaries. And just in passing, the US and the UK are not void of problems here; on the contrary, they regularly appear on worst offenders lists: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr/06/panama-paper... The other issue is basically related to accounting and how corporate tax gets levied. If you're a multinational, it's possible to set up a subsidiary in a place with to no corporate tax and make your international profits all appear there instead of coming home where they get taxed. (This is the reason US businesses were so many billions abroad in the run up to Trump's tax cuts.) Related to this is the ability to move money out of countries that do tax, using questionable licensing fees and accounting tricks the like. Example: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2016/04/20/mcdonalds-fr... Anyway, to fix this you basically need to get all countries together so there's more transparency, and dig into how corporate taxes get levied. |