It's funny because I'm a tax consultant for a living, and that's simply not been my experience. Businesses want to avoid paying taxes when possible, but it's generally not worth their effort to play tax games. A business doesn't pay taxes unless it's making profits, and it would have to be making sufficient profits that the millions they'd spend on consultants and maintaining tax avoidance strategies every year exceeds the actual tax liability by a material amount. For most businesses, that's not worth it.
Tax rates don't drive business decisions. The only time they matter is when a business is choosing between multiple otherwise equal or similar options and tax issues are the primary differentiators.
There are no penalties or jail time associated with tax-avoidance - you probably mean tax evasion which is a crime.
There are penalties associated with numerous tax avoidance strategies if the tax authority disagrees with your position; it's not necessary for the position to rise to the level of tax evasion. But on that note, there have been a number of tax avoidance strategies that were legal for years but deemed to be tax evasion after the fact, resulting in hefty fines and criminal sentences for those involved.
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has identified small business and sole proprietorship employees as the largest contributors to the tax gap between what Americans owe in federal taxes and what the federal government receives.
No citation was provided for that statement in wikipedia. Additionally, that statement conflicts with what the IRS has actually said about the tax collection gap being approximately $500 billion. https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/the-tax-gap. Based on Propublica reporting, at least $100 billion of that $500 billion is wealthy individuals like the Sackler family.
Even though corporate misdeeds grab a lot of press, corporate underreporting accounts for only $67 billion of the tax gap, or 14.8 percent.
True, but I wasn't saying that corporate tax evasion is higher than other types of tax evasion. I was comparing corporate tax evasion now to corporate tax evasion in other times. Measured against itself it's at historically high rates.
