The Americans of the Panama Papers have been exposed

I suspect the majority of the blame goes to governments who favour extremely complex tax law. As any hacker knows the bigger the attack surface the more vulnerabilities exist.

Sadly the solution many countries are now calling for to confront the prevalence of shell companies is to add more regulations and reporting laws to identify stakeholders at the time the money is being used at the final destination. This might be effective at weeding out the bad players but further increases costs for the honest businesses and diminishes their right to privacy.

Surely there must be solutions that allows for privacy of transactions among private individuals to exist while still ensuring that appropriate taxes get paid.

Typically it's the source country that's the problem. For example, tons of money is siphoned out of African countries via "transfer mispricing" [1] which is largely a regulatory failure in those countries and tax haven middlemen. Whereas the burden of uncovering the stakeholders is largely left to the countries at the end of the chain, which face a much more complex and difficult task of uncovering the players, than it would be stopping it at the source.

Simplifying tax law at the destination country to make tax obligations explicit plus shifting costs to the source/middlemen to incentivize reducing corruption in their own regulatory systems - instead of adding more burden to honest businessmen in the destination countries. Basically focusing energy/resources onto the source countries systems rather than just blindly throwing more aid money at corrupt governments which simply fuels the siphoning. The US and other western countries should be setting an example and fixing their own tax flight issues for other countries to follow.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfer_pricing#Fraud

success

The other company he is on, Brightao Corp., could be interesting, but it could also be legit.

Can't we do both. Personally I like to multitask.

"It's not patriotic to pay more in taxes than one is legally obligated to pay."

No but its stingy and crass for those who doing well to skip out on paying their share because they can. Can we admit their is a qualitative difference between filling out a form to take a credit and hiring a team of lawyers to hide your money in a foreign shell company?

"sometimes even fudging the numbers here"

So you regularly commit felonies in order to avoid paying your share?

I definitely want government to be less corrupt and wasteful (though I think the situation is greatly exaggerated, and the U.S. government is among the least corrupt), but somehow we need to pay for those services.

If they want more or less services from government, they have a chance to convince their fellow citizens to vote for what they want. But an essential part of the deal is that, once the law is written, like it or not we're all covered by it. Majority rules.

Yes.

> Shouldn't we be looking deep underground in government waste and political misconduct?

We can do both.

Taking care of waste is a separate problem.

While a lot of tax money is wasted a lot of it does a lot of good. They are skipping out on paying their fair share of those too.