[_trampeltier]

Why is Switzerland so high on the list? We might have low taxes for companys, but since many years now, other countrys get all information about the customers. So if an us person open an account, they send all information about it to the us. I think this is at least since 15 .. 20 years now.

[mastax]

The score is a combination of the amount of wealth stored and the degree to which wealth is able to be hidden in that jurisdiction. Notice that the US is number 2 on the list. It may be a heavily scrutinized jurisdiction and thus not a great tax haven in the traditional sense, but there are still huge amounts of capital moved there. They can still be useful, especially to move funds away from your country of residence's jurisdiction.

[zz865]

Wyoming, Nevada + some others have strict secrecy laws for LLCs which are great for hiding money from tax authorities. https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2016/04/panama-...

[vmception]

It's all a matter of reading comprehension. People can have a passing knowledge of "something about Delaware" for the next 100 years and never consider that there are 55+ other jurisdictions under the US brand which aim to be competitive too.

All states, the district, the territories, and even reservations have incorporation laws. The reservations are very numerous and many have not even considered the possibility, just show up and ask them to pass your model incorporation law. This is the kind of opportunity that the US still has. (There are many jurisdictions that have passed good laws, but have incompetent and ill equipped executive branches. If nobody has ever shown up to form their super awesome business type, the public servants in the state might not actually know how to do it. Whereas places with validation like Wyoming and Delaware, can have turn around times of 24 hours for things they do often.)

The other way that the US is somewhat unique, in comparison to other countries, is that there is no way to incorporate a business at the national level. Only Congress can create corporations, one at a time, one law at a time, and Congress has never addressed or delegated this to change this reality. The national government derives its power from the states and has never bothered them over this. (They did recently pass some registry of business owners law though, but it's more of a feel good thing for activists than anything practical.)

The beauty of this is that the US has an easier time pointing its bullying efforts outwards, whereas all US jurisdictions escape scrutiny by the US or OECD or other multinational bodies that put "tax havens" on blacklists.

States compete for business, so this makes more and more favorable business incorporation laws pretty easy to get.

The last thing I'll say is that there are other countries similar to the structure of the US, where there are many obscure states you can actually create business entities in. Some countries have incorporation at the national and the state level, just because the separate jurisdictions passed the laws. Some countries you might not even notice are federations of smaller states. So again, its all about reading comprehension. The usefulness of this knowledge is that some countries brands might attract scrutiny now (ie. "Panama corporation"), while the state level version is completely benign to everyone because they just haven't seen the name and aren't allergic to it.

[jacquesm]

For instance, a lot of Chinese capital that is 'on the run' is hiding in the USA and Canada.

[ficklepickle]

In BC we have numbered corporations, it's quite cheap to incorporate and very little info is made public.

To look up corporate records, you need to apply and get approval, pay $100 and some additional amount per record. Then it is an ancient batch CGI web app that gets you results some days later.

I've been meaning to build a corporate transparency site/non-profit. Some low price per record, but then the results are public on the site for anybody else that is interested.

[coldtea]

>It may be a heavily scrutinized jurisdiction and thus not a great tax haven in the traditional sense

Well, between Delaware and Nevada there are lots of unscrutinized jurisdictions...

[vmception]

US FATCA treaty to almost all countries in the world only applies to US citizens trying to open accounts in other countries. That is a one-to-many relationship.

The worldwide reality is a many-to-many relationship. Switzerland doesn't snitch on other country's citizens for two reasons:

1) Other countries don't have the resources to enforce a global tax regime. And if they tried, their diplomatic leverage was so weak that it was laughed at.

2) Other countries never even attempted to pass laws for a global tax regime, that is an almost uniquely American hubris, and even with the US's massive resources it also struggles to enforce this stretch of the jurisdiction concept.

[ckastner]

> The worldwide reality is a many-to-many relationship. Switzerland doesn't snitch on other country's citizens for two reasons

That is wrong, see AEOI/CRS as mentioned above. Switzerland exchanges information with dozens of countries and has been doing so since 2017.

And strictly speaking, it's not about citizship, but tax residency. A Danish national living in France will have their Swiss bank account reported to France, not Denmark.

[vmception]

> and has been doing so since 2017

oh that's new to me!

didn't know OECD had actually gotten anywhere beyond blacklists.

I've seen CRS in a variety of countries, many of those are still implemented in interesting ways, and also don't mean there is liability or tax liability for the ultimate owners.

[aficiomaquinas]

Switzerland is a tax-heaven for the ultra wealthy. These individuals buy passports from countries with territorial or no tax at all. This way they can open bank accounts claiming to be tax residents in such countries, and avoid tax reporting to their true tax resident country. When the OECD designed the information exchange protocol they did learn about this phenomenon. It turns out that the implementation of CRS (common reporting standards) was actually different from country to country. The OECD negotiated each deal individually with all the different countries in the world. One of the very few features of AEOI (automatic exchange of information) in the CRS that Switzerland did not sign fully with the OECD, was the "enhanced" validation of the account holder citizenship. It was marked "optional" for Swiss banks to validate. [1] Switzerland has been a tax haven for so many years now (they invented the business, we could argue), that they don't care about the small fish anymore. They are all about the UHNW (ultra high net worth) individuals and families. Now, there is some interesting things to be noted for such individuals. Many centamillionaires and billionaires are tax residents in many countries. They own properties and businesses all across the world, which often needs you to have tax IDs in those countries, either as a natural person, as a corporation or both. It doesn't matter if the corporation, in such case, is a complicated and obfuscated entity because the bank reports the tax id of the significant owners, not regarding how many layers of corporate structures there are (except for exotic "non-incorporated" entities such as trusts, which also serve the purpose of reducing tax burdens or hiding away assets). Most tax systems across the world were designed for normal people who don't own stuff all around the world and are based upon the principle of worldwide taxation based on your "true" residence. Truth is many of these billionaires are not true only-residents of any country. They might be traveling around the world for many months each year, having multiple homes across the world. So, which should be their "true" tax resident country? Apart from the USA, which taxes Americans regardless of where they reside, most of the remaining countries of the world are pretty ambiguous about this dilemma and most importantly, they are unable to enforce taxation of the worldwide income, and in the end, in practice, people with multiple citizenships and permanent residencies just choose whichever is more convenient when making their invoices or opening their bank accounts. That's why Switzerland may score so high on the list. Almost all UHNW individuals have bank accounts in Switzerland because they open them with their most convenient passports and/or permanent residence cards, and they prefer to bank in Switzerland because they have better perks, better mobile apps, better account managers, they can get an AMEX black card guaranteed by their private banking account balance, and much more.

1: https://www.oecd.org/tax/automatic-exchange/crs-implementati...

[anonymousDan]

Very interesting, thanks for the insight.

[coldtea]

>but since many years now, other countrys get all information about the customers

Or, do they?

>So if an us person open an account, they send all information about it to the us. I think this is at least since 15 .. 20 years now.

And what if a person opens an account under this and that scheme, that ends up sending only irrelevant information about some mediator?

[ies7]

The same with why US in no 2. USA is a tax haven for non US.