If your tax preparer tells you that, thanks to deductions written into tax law, you only need to pay half as much tax, do you tell them "no, leave the deductions off, I want to do my civic duty"?
In this case, the UK government disagreed with the interpretation of those deductions, leading to a dispute that this article reports the resolution of. But that doesn't seem like any reason to claim that it's the "civic duty" of anyone, person or corporation, to pay more tax than they absolutely have to.
The fallacy here is that when you look at the numbers, they're not just using ordinary deductions - they can't because then they couldn't arrive at these results.
These kind of things work by deliberately setting up perverse virtual organizational structures to take advantage of complex loop holes. It is abusive, in the strict term of the word.
Using your analogy, would what you say if your tax preparer told you that if you proforma-married a woman in country X and used her name to set up a non-existing company in country Y, because then you'd qualify for certain deductions?
Comparatively in terms of size of the commitment you example would be more like an accountant telling Google that they could make big savings if they moved 10k employees across to a tax haven.
A better comparison for what is happening would be your accountant telling you you could pay them 1% of your yearly earnings extra and they could set you up to save many times that in tax.
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If your tax preparer tells you that, thanks to deductions written into tax law, you only need to pay half as much tax, do you tell them "no, leave the deductions off, I want to do my civic duty"?
In this case, the UK government disagreed with the interpretation of those deductions, leading to a dispute that this article reports the resolution of. But that doesn't seem like any reason to claim that it's the "civic duty" of anyone, person or corporation, to pay more tax than they absolutely have to.
The fallacy here is that when you look at the numbers, they're not just using ordinary deductions - they can't because then they couldn't arrive at these results.
These kind of things work by deliberately setting up perverse virtual organizational structures to take advantage of complex loop holes. It is abusive, in the strict term of the word.
Using your analogy, would what you say if your tax preparer told you that if you proforma-married a woman in country X and used her name to set up a non-existing company in country Y, because then you'd qualify for certain deductions?
Comparatively in terms of size of the commitment you example would be more like an accountant telling Google that they could make big savings if they moved 10k employees across to a tax haven.
A better comparison for what is happening would be your accountant telling you you could pay them 1% of your yearly earnings extra and they could set you up to save many times that in tax.