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Comment by iand | Hacker News Reader

When you put your money into a structured pension plan for your retirement then it's tax avoidance since you are avoiding paying the tax you normally would if you invested it in some other way. Tax evasion is where you break the law by hiding money that should be taxed. Quite a big difference.

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I think a lot of people (myself included) tend to focus on the "how" rather than the "why".

Presumably, big corporations are not only avoiding tax via legal means, but they are creating these legal means to avoid tax. Why do it illegally, when you can bribe/buy politicians, who then pass laws and allow you to avoid all the tax you want.

It could be 100% legal (not bribery specifically, but campaign financing for example), but i don't think most people are really okay with it.

I'm perfectly okay with someone finding a legal loophole, i am not okay with them blocking said loophole, or introducing new ones.

This is, notoriously, how tax avoidance works in the UK. There's a revolving door between the big accountancy firms that work out tax avoidance schemes, HMRC, which is the UK's IRS, and policy desk's in the Treasury, which define tax policy.

HMRC has been notoriously lax in enforcing and collecting tax nominally owed by the largest corporations - most recently Google, which "negotiated" a payment of £130m in back taxes due on £4.6bn in sales.

The details of the "negotiation" have been kept confidential, so we have no way of knowing how they were calculated.

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