Afterward Uber helped Macron campaign who then ordered National Financial Prosecutor's office to "stop bothering them" so I don't think anything new happened since.
Edit: Some sources in below replies for infos on both. Turn out I'm wrong for 2nd part it started earlier than his campaign.
EDIT: Article on the kills switch https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/jul/10/uber-bosses-tol...
Isn’t that kinda definiton of corruption?
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.
Do you have any articles about this? Because this is insane if true.
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.
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.
It was a good listen. At first she needed to go empty handed, but then teamed up with competent tech guys. After that the smug faces stating, that the amount of data would be to much to handle for her little department quickly turned into concerned faces.
Sounds like it would make it easier for law enforcement. They no longer need a warrant against/for the company they're investigating, just the place where their data is stored. Get the warrant, raid the place and grab the drives, then continue the investigation. Done the right way, the company under investigation wouldn't even notice it.
Isn't most data in the cloud heavily distributed and broken into shards across many racks and drives and such? And encrypted so is useless outside of the custom block storage system employed by the cloud provider?
They would need to decrypt and assemble the shards to get usable data out.
I have no clue how they would even know which drives out the tens of thousands to grab, and they would also have other customer's data on them.
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_...
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...
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?
I would hire homeless people to “run” the company.
The police could just find the correct targets and raid their home instead.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/05/update-email-privacy-l...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Communications_Priv...
As an American, I'd be really surprised if we let that happen. I looked and found it apparently happened once, in 2009 in Texas: https://www.cio.com/article/278564/data-center-when-the-fbi-...
It resulted in another company essentially being shut down, and suing for their data back. Crazy. There has to be a better way of doing that digitally (I assume there is, these days, and we won't see something like this again).
They also raid anyone else they don't like, such as people who run Tor exit nodes... but random small businesses are not in that group.
It's not so much breaking laws, but unnecessary restrictions and harassment by Europeans states.
The US is business friendly. It's industry friendly. We don't needlessly harass the business of sovereign individuals, and the state apparatus isn't being used as an excuse as to exert power or influence over the population. Not to the same paternalistic extent of Europe.
In Europe the liberal state apparatus that replaced the monarchies are acting an awful lot like the monarchies.
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.
For 99,9% of companies, you get audited every 5—25 years by getting a visit from your local tax authority.
Remember: Small/medium companies have comparable companies and you can easily spot the tax dodgers. Or tax dodging is unofficially tolerated to some degree — think restaurants only accepting cash.
Most companies are not as blatantly illegal as Uber..
> Last year, French media outlet La Lettre reported that until 2021, Netflix in France minimised its tax payments by declaring its turnover generated in France to the Netherlands.
> investigators are trying to determine whether Netflix continued to attempt to minimise its profits after 2021.
Wasn't Uber or some other US company found doing something similar? First they were found to be in violation of some law/dodging taxes, said they'd fix it and later found to not have done anything about it? Is that behavior perhaps more accepted in the US than Europe?
Airbnb, they had to pay like 70k of tax a few years ago. There are employees who pay as much tax as single filers lol
They paid 18% less tax in 2016 than in 2013 while the number of flats available on the site went from 30k to 300k
https://www.lesechos.fr/2016/08/airbnb-na-paye-que-69168-eur...
Completely meaningless without also saying what their costs and investments were.
Spending is the moment when the money shows its ugly head and does harm.
It’s mind boggling how widespread it is, how accepted (legal) it is, and how it will seemingly never be fixed.
Yeah, but I think that's different than what happened in this case with Netflix. Declaring earnings from one country in another country is not just "tax optimizations" but straight up illegal. It's not using/abusing legal loopholes like most larger companies do, but going against the law.
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.
Unsurprisingly the licensing fees for using Orange brand that the Polish company had to pay to France Telecom amounted to large percentage of taxable profits that the Polish company had. Overt theft from Polish company and Polish taxpayers.
No but seriously, this doesn't sound surprising? Why should France be against a French company buying up other companies and bringing revenue back to France
A few years ago they had to pay huge amounts of money to the Swedish government because of some tax-dodging loophole was deemed illegal by court-order. So Klarna went into a desperate attempt to last-minute cut costs to not tank the stock value due to much lower expected returns that quarter.
It was kinda funny because the employees of Klarna are unionized they couldn't just fire anyone on short notice like that, but they did let go pretty much all consultants in one swoop. If this was the US the CEO would have just fired a bunch of people because the CFO f-ed up. For a few months there was a major glut of former-Klarna consultants around in Stockholm, two of them ended up at my company at the time.
I couldn't find details about this tax dodging online (it was around 5 years ago), but here is another article about Klarna being in trouble over GDPR violations:
https://www.reuters.com/technology/swedens-klarna-fined-7330...
Until that moment it did the exact opposite including opening criminal investigations into the journalists calling it a scam.
This becomes more difficult as more tax authorities better integrate with one another, which admittedly, is something many in in the U.S. fidget over, even if it is realized that the need for it is almost entirely a byproduct of these types of people's actions that necessitate that happening.
It's nonsense of course. Companies should (in my opinion) shoulder their fair share of tax because otherwise that burden falls disproportionately on individual income tax.
> 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.
Moreover, tax authorities have increasingly taken the position that the use of these planning methods constitutes tax evasion. The Dutch Sandwich and Double Irish were grandfathered in (meaning, not treated as criminal tax evasion) but a company utilizing similar schemes today would ultimately result in one or more of their executives spending time in jail.
Critically, most of tax law is actually regulation that implements statutes. Tax planning schemes that satisfy the technical letter of regulations but which violate the plain intent of the written statute can, and have, been deemed illegal years or even decades later (see, for example, the Bermudan tax loss harvesting scheme), and this has repeatedly passed constitutional muster.
- because companies heavily use government resources like roads and stuff.
- because losses can be offset against profits. These tend to be middled out over multiple years. You can port losses to other years.
- a lot of companies (holdings etc.) don't pay out income tax and are basically just letterbox companies. These companies need to pay tax on dividends otherwise they would literally pay zero tax.
These losses expire (different from country to country)!! Plus, inflation is not taken into account.
> a lot of companies (holdings etc.) don't pay out income tax and are basically just letterbox companies. These companies need to pay tax on dividends otherwise they would literally pay zero tax.
Tax on dividends is not corporate income tax. Dividend tax is classified as capital gains tax, which is entirely separate. My point is that anyone taking out money must pay taxes through personal income tax or dividend tax. So corporate income tax is just money that would be taxed anyway - or invested/used by the company. So no real purpose other than producing another cash inflow for the government.
It is baffling to think that for-profit corporations should be allowed to use public services without paying for them: before a company makes further internal investments with new revenue, it should chip in to society for building the infrastructure that made the revenue possible. A corporate income tax is perfectly natural.
Some amount of revenue must be raised. Suggest an alternative. Not taxing corp profits will result is less overall tax income (it wont be made up in shareholder taxes).
You also generally can't tax the revenue instead of profits (except perhaps few percent of revenue as the minimal tax), because different companies have hugely different amounts of revenue and expenses.
There is no double taxation. Transactions are taxed, not money.
Reasonable corporate taxes are a net positive for the economy of the county that issues them.
