[cjbgkagh]

Tax law is guilty until proven innocent.

Investor fraud is usually brought as a civil case and takes a balance of evidence approach.

Since enforcement is stochastic and rare these practices are pretty common. The freedom to do ‘whatever’ is really dependent on the discretion of the government and investors. Most companies can and do fly under the radar but have to be careful not to piss off the wrong people.

[philipallstar]

Okay but then why are we singling this out as tax fraud, if the justification is just "anything can be"? Why not claim that posting on HN is tax fraud?

[cjbgkagh]

Barter counts as income by many tax jurisdictions, if you don’t declare the fair market value of the exchange you are in violation. Most people don’t declare this and it is rarely ever enforced.

[gamblor956]

Tax fraud is treated the same as other crimes and is subject to the same evidentiary threshold.

[cjbgkagh]

It depends on jurisdiction, the US is unusual, most countries they’ll reassess you and it’s on you to prove them wrong.

I did have to look it up, I didn’t know that the US was different in this way. I did have the California tax authority make a mistake and take money directly out of my account and there didn’t appear to be a way to fight it. It wasn’t enough to be worth hiring a lawyer over so I let it go but it didn’t give me much faith in the governance of California, very Kafkaesque.

[gamblor956]

I'm a tax lawyer...

CA FTB does not take money out of your account unless you have explicitly authorized it to do so and it definitely does not do so automatically. It only pulls specifically authorized amounts when specifically authorized to do so unless you have a garnishment order issued by a court. (I deal with the CA FTB on a daily basis.)

You're also wrong about most other countries as well, with the exception of France.

[cjbgkagh]

It is possible my memory, Google, and now AI are all conspiring against me.

It was a vehicle registration issue for a car I had sold 10 years earlier, it got a parking ticket in CA and they used that as evidence I still had the car and owed registration fees. I had evidence the car was sold and had changed title many times since then before the parking ticket but they wouldn’t accept that. I didn’t go to court over this and the money disappeared from my account, I did get a phone call telling me what happened. I had not received any notice prior. As mentioned I’m sure I could have gotten a lawyer for this but legal fees would have exceeded the amount lost, perhaps in the future when I have a lawyer on retainer.