And its sad to see the atrocious quality of the BBC article. Even high school students learn that a journalistic piece, should make sure it touches the Five Ws of good journalism...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Ws

The Hollywood Reporter has much better quality reporting including context: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/net...

https://leb.fbi.gov/articles/featured-articles/executing-sea...

Or in China, just take the entire data center. https://www.theregister.com/2018/01/11/icloud_china_goes_to_...

Pretty crazy to support a business designed to never pay tax. This bring nothing beside "precarious employment".

It’s been rebranded to “lobbying” and “campaign contributions”. Much cleaner. Better optics.

If the state turns up at that address, and you tell them they’re at the wrong address, then the directors start becoming liable for fraudulent behaviour.

If you aren't -- you'll find the enforcement end of the tax authorities in ANY country are pretty efficient. Even in third world countries where many services are falling down the tax authorities will be a well oiled machine as the stability of the entire country rests on the government even corrupt ones to collect taxes.

> under penalty (you shall bring with you)

[0]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/subpoena%20duces%...

I expect my polkticians not to let themselves be dazzled by the complexity of their tax schemes and tax them the same amount they would if I sold that service here.

Does not seem too controversial.

We worked for a small company, so we knew that they're here for the big company that does credit card transactions, but it was both surprising and ... absolutely uneventful, they didn't even talk to us. (As we were leaving we didn't even run into them - at least I don't recall any interaction.)

Later the sysadmins of the big company had amazing stories about how the tax authorities wanted copies of every hard drive. And when they told them that, sure, sure, but things are on a RAID and without the config and the card it'll be useless. They didn't care of course :)

China is a little more arbitrary and political, that makes it less predictable and bad for business.

Until that moment it did the exact opposite including opening criminal investigations into the journalists calling it a scam.

Ultimately, if you really have bad intentions, you find a way. It’s a question of risk and responsibility if you want to put yourself in such a position or not.

Speaking of taxing revenue instead of profits, that's another reason the current tax regime is so galling (at least speaking from a USian perspective). Individuals essentially are taxed on revenue and can't deduct things that would otherwise be straightforward deductions in a business context, as necessary and proper expenses required to earn that revenue.

> After pressure from the EU,[22] the Double Irish BEPS tool was closed to new users in 2015,[citation needed] however, new Irish BEPS tools were created to replace it:[23][24]

Not only do the original evaders get to continue doing it, they’ve also found new loopholes already.

Plus you can engage in some jurisdiction arbitrage where all the documents pertaining to country A is stored in country B, and all the documents pertaining to country B is stored in country A.

> Second are they really going to raid and take the drives at an AWS data center that has other customer’s information?

You can also ask AWS to produce the files/documents for you.

Raiding AWS: call Amazon, provide subpoena, Amazon can either give access to the account or provide copies of data. This would only allow access to non-customer encrypted data.

I played with encryption schemes and obfuscation pretty heavily for a long time, but at the end of the day companies operate within the legal frameworks of the countries they reside in. If you don’t cooperate, you could end up in jail anyway.

I think the conclusion I’ve come to is that you have to play by the rules. If you don’t like them, is it really worth falling on the sword for a corporate entity?

> Tim Pritlove: Okay, zweiter Bildungsweg. Welches Instrument haben Sie denn gespielt?

> Anne Brohrhilker: Klavierung, Pferdflöte.

Oh, AI transcribed. Nevermind.

If we consider the Irish sandwich mechanism that was recently “stopped”, somehow that hasn’t materially affected any of the innumerable companies that were using it. As we saw in the Apple vs EU case, most practices might’ve never been actually legal either.

So my personal opinion is that (almost) all tax “optimization” is at the minimum immoral, but most likely illegal too.

Edit: This reminds me of the idea of temporarily embarrassed millionaires. Your personal optimization is not what I’m talking about - corporations have legal teams the size of SMBs lobbying/creating/looking for secret loopholes, and people are talking about public self service methods.

I actually was imprecise with my wording.

A customer managed KMS key is any key that you make instead of using an AWS provided key. AWS still has the means to theoretically decrypt the data.

I am actually referring to a customer managed KMS key where you import your own key material

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/kms/latest/developerguide/import...

There is also CloudHSM

https://aws.amazon.com/cloudhsm/faqs/#:~:text=AWS%20CloudHSM....

I don’t know how far “AWS doesn’t have access to your keys go” when it comes to a government subpoena.

I do know that if anyone accesses anything on your account from AWS, all sorts of internal alarm bells go off at AWS and it would still show up in your CloudTrail logs.

I’m sure there is something that allows internal AWS employees to access your account in unauthorized ways. But I never heard about it in 3.5 years working there in the Professional Services department.

You're right, the U.S. is very business and industry friendly, which explains why the American people have been getting poorer and poorer while corporations and their shareholders get richer and richer.

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...

We had a raid in one of my previous company due to copyright violation due to a user uploaded content. Authorities came in to take in all the codebase, reports and even employee devices. Basically once given court permission, police would try to collect all the unrelated things which could be taken in the permission, so that they could extort you later.

Especially Europe. Europeans don’t even seem to understand how large America is, which is why so few have passports.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_disclosure_law

This is also easily accomplished now that almost all payments are happening digitally, assigned to a taxpayer ID#. We can easily replace a W-2 or 1099 with total spending instead of taxing working.

Of course, this should also be paired with similarly designed land value and estate taxes to disincentivize hoarding.

Why would it be risky to pay some percentage more on what you spend but not pay income tax at all?

Money changes hands so it's taxed with a purchase tax as a general rule.

> it will become proportional. What is still not very good.

Progressive tax currently is just a theory. Rich actually pay regressive tax. I'd take proprtional tax over ostensibly progressive tax but in reality regressive tax any day.

VAT could do a lot of the same things that I'm proposing (if the deductions weren't 100%) but is limited in scope. And because of that it has a lot of interfaces to other domains like real estate, import, labor, financial intruments. Interfaces that can be exploited to avoid paying taxes.

General purchase tax could replace all taxes and fees transfered from the markets to governments (and effectively goverment managed buckets like social security or public healthcare).

Taxes have this strong moral objection that they are punishment for creating value. Purchase tax could help with that by ostensibly being punishment for using up value not for creating value. It might also compose well with transition to stable state economy that will have to replace old economy based on unbounded growth.

For companies that deliberately obstruct justice work? Have the board and a healthy amount of executives serve 20 years in a high security prison, seize the assets and investigate their investors' due dilligence process. Gather proof with infiltrated workers.

Tech leaders need to learn that criminal conspiracy is not part of a good business plan. If they start using mafia tactics, so can Justice.

Earlier you said

> And poorer people are automatically exempted from tax since the power law formula parameters be set to slowly ramp up

I too am very confused on how you envision this sales tax working where it's variable in some way that poor people don't get the tax but rich people do so I understand why OP is asking about asset tracking. If you're talking about it as a tax that increases the more you spend you've still got problems of hiding how much I'm spending through various legal entities. It also has a macro economic problem, at least how the consumer economy is structured, that could slow down the gears of business until society realigns (if it does) because people will be incentivized to consume less. You've got alternative models where you go after specific products and tax more for conspicuous consumption like yachts but that feels like it has all the inefficiencies of central planning a market.

No? Then the world is a lot more complex than property rights trumping everything else.

You'd have to have huge database of what every individual bought ever. How many beers, how many condoms per month they purchase. Or at least how many times they were making purchases in sex shop, liquor store, marihuana dispensary.

Currently your payments as a customer aren't bound to your TAX is if you don't specifically opt into it and you have no reason to do that if you don't have a company.

That's increase in a intrusiveness many would strongly oppose.

You can of course compromise and base your tax progression only on the sum of large purchases that are being registered already like houses and cars and investments.

But there's still issue of charging the correct tax if you don't connect consumer with their tax id on every purchase.

I think that companies that sell directly to consumers should collect purchase tax of consumer and pay it. And the rate should be the same for all consumers. To award consumers tax credits government just could give them cash directly that will come back to the government in the form of purchase tax that consumers pay (to sellers or through payment processors that transfer it to the government).

You can still punish the rich by reducing their tax credits progressively with how much assets such as cars, real estate and investments they own.

This is the thing which is not the case. The subsidiary in the US is nearly always a different company than the one(s) in Europe. They'll have different management and different lawyers etc. Sometimes they even have different owners, e.g. because one of them is a joint venture with some other company, or a franchise. And they have to be different, because different countries have different laws and those laws often conflict with each other. So the subsidiary in the US follows US law and the one in France follows the law in France.

You could try to make it otherwise, but it's pretty obvious what would happen then. Companies couldn't formally operate in multiple countries because their laws are incompatible, so instead there would be a straw front company in any given country that nominally isn't owned by the conglomerate, but is effectively just reselling their product/service in that country for an additional margin that only pays the salary of local management. To prevent this you would have to ban companies from having foreign suppliers, which is not very practical.

And since countries know that's what would happen, they allow foreign subsidiaries to be regarded as separate entities even if they have shared ownership, instead of demanding the charade.

Preventing access to your accounts during an audit is quite fishy, especially for an onsite audit without warning which, in France, is supposed to happen only if the authorities have doubts that you could make some evidences disappear. During an audit, the CEO is supposed to provide the documents, the inspectors are not supposed to access your files themselves I think.

(So blocking access for security reasons is bullshit, to answer someone else, the right thing to do is to have all the pieces in order for when an audit happens anyway)

You're in favor of holding executives hostage to demand access to data? If they actually did something illegal, they can be arrested/tried for that, but arresting executives as a means to coerce companies into doing stuff is a total perversion of the rule of law.

Yes, tax liability = total spending during the year plugged into the power law tax formula.

>Are exotic cars taxed more?

Depends how much the taxpayer spends in a year. There is no tax rate for each specific item. The tax rate is for a total level of spending, which eliminates all loopholes.

> You keep stating to use a power law formula but you're critically omitting what the inputs are to determine your tax rate.

The input is total spend in a year. Just like right now, the input is income in a year.

> And now you've also admitted that assets determine your sales tax

No, I did not. The formula to calculate sales tax liability only requires inputting total spending. Land value taxes are a separate thing. We currently have land value taxes, except they are flat rate and too low because property taxes inefficiently tax improvements on the land more than the land itself.

> That's why the income tax is effective - it's taxation at the moment the money changes hands / you've realized a gain.

Sales tax can also be at the moment the money changes hands. It currently is. Even with the complication of a power law tax formula, I can’t see why the government can’t email you a monthly invoice.

If executives don't want to sit in jail due to their company's shady tactics they can just not approve those tactics.

Alternative would be to shut the business down completely until they cooperate.

At that point, whether you are in contempt or not depends on the answer to the question "did you know that the cops were entering to look for evidence before you threw the keys?" Whether the judge holds you in contempt or not is a function of the free choice of the judge and is not related to the answer to the first question (though whether or not the judge should hold you in contempt is a function of what the judge believes about what you believed).

If we're trying for a metaphor that would be a similar situation pre-digitization, the cloud servers containing business documents could be considered head office, and the office being raided would be the branch office. The branch office would continually be communicating with head office for their operations, and that communication would be shut down during the raid.

This isn't a great metaphor because the "head office" has become sort of stateless and ephemeral with digitization, but that's part of the interesting question the OP was posing, how does law enforcement collect evidence when that evidence is hosted on cloud servers in nebulous datacenters?

What if the safe was never in your house at all, but it was in a foreign country across an ocean? And when the cops showed up, you simply threw the keys across the ocean too?

If the cops know of something particular in the safe, then maybe the judge could find you in contempt for not producing that thing when ordered by the court, but otherwise, I don't see how they have any legal leg to stand on.

If the judge receives a call from the ministry of justice, they will care a great deal about the distinction.

And if a corporate entity finds a way to openly defy a national government, it tends to happen that those governments find a way to change the law (they're the ones making it, right? :P) for that defiance to become punishable by other parts of those governments which can sanction the corporation, prevent their operations within the country or even throw people in jail.

Also those are not only taxes on consumption but every purchase. Yacht might be too cheap in comparison of resources used but rich don't just buy yahts, they buy entire companies.