[playingalong]

The whole point (or at least the main point) of the tax paperwork is to be able to produce them to tax investigators. If you don't want to share anything, then it's easier not to do the accounting. Which I guess is severally illegal globally.

[HelloNurse]

Being unable/unwilling to produce mandatory records is fraud. Technical measures to be unable to produce records (e.g. offshore and encrypted archival) are evidence of criminal intent and possibly separate crimes.

[spwa4]

So why did every company in the world start auto-deleting emails ~10 years ago? I don't believe many people were sued for fraud. These days cloud services have auto-delete based on time functionality?

It's called "object lifecycle management", because I guess fraud was too catchy.

[izacus]

You mean the auto-deletion that DOJ considered as deliberate destruction of evidence in Google case? [0]

Or are you talking about deliberate destruction of accounting records, which are required to be held by the relevant law of the governments?

[0]:https://www.legaldive.com/news/doj-google-spoliation-hangout...

[gruez]

Usually tax laws have a cut-off date. You don't need to keep records forever, but you do need to keep them around for a few years.

[spwa4]

Strange, because that sounds reasonable but the reasoning doesn't actually work, does it?

Either "the law" can be trusted, and there's no point to deleting data after a cut-off date, or the reverse is true and you're no worse off getting caught deleting data.

I believe the law actually provides a middle ground. You're liable for tax fraud for X years, but you're allowed to delete the data after Y years. Since X > Y you make it much harder for the tax office to sue you if you delete data. Plus make it pointless for them to use their other investigative powers against you, which is in reality more important, especially for smaller firms.