Tax evasion, the act of using illegal methods to minimise the tax you pay, is illegal.
Tax avoidance, the act of working within the law to minimise the tax you pay, is legal. In fact, it is not only legal, but both morally and fiscally responsible.
So why the flippedy fuck are HMRC “investigating” allegations of tax avoidance at Barclays? They’re investigating looking for evidence of people obeying the law?
Nice to see that they’re proving my point: government should be given the minimum money possible lest they waste it doing stupid things like this…
Are you saying tax avoidance is morally responsible? You think that huge corporations should be able to do everything possible (even to the extent of lots of things that are so complicated the under-funded HMRC can’t even investigate them to see if they are legal) to avoid paying taxes? Imagine how much lower taxes could be for individuals and small businesses if there wasn’t so much corporate tax avoidance.
Yes, I am saying that tax avoidance is morally responsible. For a corporation, their primary legal and moral obligation is to their shareholders – this means that they are morally bound to pay as little tax as possible to ensure that their shareholders get the best returns.
You could go a little further and wonder why corporations are taxed at all. Surely it would be more efficient to get rid of corporation tax and concentrate on collecting the income tax from the shareholders…
Also: it’s HMRC’s fault if they can’t keep up. They write the fecking loopholes in the first place.
That’s the situation in Estonia. There is no corporation tax – it’s just collected as income tax when/if paid out as dividends. Every now and again the EU complain about how this breaks some tax treaty or other and so the powers that be disappear into a back room somewhere, and discover another loophole that lets the country keep doing this for a while longer. The Estonian government seem to have the right mentality on all this. Plus, of course, the income tax rate decreases by one percentage point on January 1st every year to force the government to get more efficient, rather than bigger and more bloated as is the norm. (Well, almost every year. They had to defer it this year due to a shortfall in income tax receipts last year and managing a balanced budget is required too…)
Well, I figured that you were out there for a reason, and I didn’t think that it was the climate…
Imagine, a government having to balance the budget. This sounds like the sort of thing that the smaller, less statist states of the US used to try doing.