More Than 100 Universities and Colleges Included in Offshore Leaks Database
icij.org
icij.org
I don't think they are trying to insult anyone's intelligence though. They are just being careful with the data so that their sources are safe.
While safety is important, this reminds me of the story of the boy who cried wolf. If they keep doing this multiple times and there is no substantial info., people will stop paying attention when there is some real info. and demagogues will use this as evidence of fake news.
I'm not exactly sure how that's a big deal, nothing there implies they avoid taxes or anything. (Maybe the fund they invest in does shady things, but it doesn't look like they have any kind of weird offshore setup)
No, not everyone. And not everyone evades or optimises tax either.
It's particularly egregious in the case of ostensibly not-for-profit educational institutions.
Tax authorities usually struggle to reconstruct the entire chain, so they don't prosecute... until somebody else does the job for them, and then they piggyback.
Is your concern that their interpretation of the source material is inaccurate, or that you're being intentionally misled or occluded?
The ICIJ has been around for two decades, and their credibility is robust. I don't think they're likely to be making claims like this without access to substantial evidence.
Do you know that?
Also, I certainly wouldn't agree that journalism isn't complex.
And it's absolutely the case that most journalists covering complex domains don't have an educational background in the domain, and in most domains the market doesn't really reward development of domain expertise (in political reporting, there's some pressure driving reporters to develop some expertise in electoral politics, but that's kind of exceptional, and isn't reflected in other domains, even the policy end of political reporting.)
Also, I know people like to criticize journalists (despite having no domain expertise in journalism), but let's raise our standards to making well-supported, informative statements:
> A journalist without domain expertise or the support of a domain expert without an agenda related to the subject-matter of the reporting is crippled ...
A developer who is illiterate also is limited, but that isn't meaningful. It tells us nothing about any particular developer or about the population of developers.
> it's absolutely the case that most journalists covering complex domains don't have an educational background in the domain
That's a very broad statement, about every journalist who covers every "complex" domain. How many have backgrounds in what domains?
And it implies that lacking educational background means they don't understand the field they cover. Certainly that's not true. Many people I know lack an educational background in their professions; many Silicon Valley legends have no educational background. Some lawyers run large companies, including financial companies, despite lacking MBAs or any financial education. As I wrote in another HN post, Herbert Simon won a Nobel Prize in Economics, won a Turing Award, wrote the book on industrial organization, was a leader in cognitive psychology, and his educational background was political science.
A journalist who has covered finance for decades certainly has domain expertise.
While the documents may be interesting to you and others, they're not yours to disseminate. If the graph is meaningless to you, then you should ignore it.
I note that the Australian Tax Office published a press release [1] earlier this month around the Paradise Papers. Presumably other nation state revenue collection agencies have released similar, or at least have comparable expectations from this latest set of papers.
Reading between the lines, there's an expectation that a release of the entire set of source papers may reduce the efficacy of their efforts to recover these lost revenues. I concede that I may be optimistic in my interpretation and expectations here.
[1] https://www.ato.gov.au/Media-centre/Media-releases/ATO-state...
They don't release original documents, but still pretty good.
If an organization is working within the legal confines of the relevant tax systems, exactly what are they guilty of? Being the best possible stewards of their donations?
This is the problem.
I am all for not paying more taxes than necessary but it should be the same for everyone not just for the few with money to pay the lawyers and pay the fees.
Your view is unrealistic because you don't want that advantage, forget about doing anything to get it, and pretend people who have the advantage can be tamed. Like turning lions into deer.
Never going to happen.
The middle class can very well benefit from offshoring. It may not be for everyone, but it certainly isn’t only a thing for rich people.
It's not for the middle class. Upper middle class sure but not average middle class and it doesn't change the fact that it's not equal for all.
Additionally, I think there's a really important difference between following the law and being a moral person (or a moral university, or a moral corporation). The law might approximate our conception of morality, but it doesn't cover it completely. There is an enormous grey area of activity that is legal, immoral, and newsworthy.
As an aside, perhaps one reason why there are so many "young people disenchanted with democracy" is your attitude: that a never-ending war between lawyers (looking for loopholes) and lawmakers (who should, in theory, be closing loopholes) is a feature. If that's a feature of democracy then maybe we should take another look at our options.
(I don't really feel that way. Well, sometimes I do, but on average I think democracy is the best we're going to get).
Did you read the article? The ICIJ notices that these are registered as charities in the states which means they are tax exempt except when the come across things that trigger UBIT. UBIT is an automatic 40% tax. University endowments are able to invest everywhere tax free, except when some debt financed transactions trigger UBIT for all tax exempt shareholders.
UBIT wasn't created to ensnare university endowments in scenarios where founders and board members of independent companies happened to get an exit through debt financing.
This is a circumstance where you adapt. Avoid that misapplication of tax by registering a business in another country and investing in the same thing through it.
The thing is that we as a society have decided that we impose taxes in order to fund common things like protection, infrastructure etc. If now certain members of this society decide they do not want to pay their share anymore, they can say that publicly and we can all decide whether it is for the public good or not (and in the latter case, they can decide whether they want to leave the society in consequence). But what they are currently doing now is hiding that they do not contribute their share to our common good anymore and yes, that is amoral. Its acceptable (and anyones right) to have an opinion (about taxes) but I can expect you to be honest about it.
This behavior isn't mass murder or oppression, but failing to pay your share of your communities/nation's bills - which puts more burden on your neighbors / fellow citizens - isn't acceptable to me. 'I can get away with it in court' isn't a good excuse.
It's a philosophical point about the sort of society you want to live in: one were most people do the right thing most of the time, just because it's the right thing, or one in which everyone must be continuously and intrusively monitored and regulated.
Here in England the Queen is implicated in the Paradise Papers. Now technically the Queen doesn't need to pay taxes at all, but even so, she still feels the need to cheat the system anyway. Given that the Head of State, (supposably) appointed by God as a role model for us all to rule by divine right doesn't see any need to contribute towards the NHS, schools, roads, police, the defence of the realm, etc, exactly what moral authority does anyone have to tell anyone to contribute their fair share? "A fish rots from the head down" is the saying, for good reason.
To apply this to universities they're basically saying if you can find a means to cheat in your exams that we haven't specifically banned, you can use it. Whereas I think most people would expect universities to be opposed to all cheating and also to educate their students that cheating is wrong...
UBIT 40% tax on charities was not created to hit university endowments. This is a reason to use an offshore entity.
So you're saying we can all simply pick and choose which laws were created with us in mind?
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/08/world/universities-offsho...
There's certainly a lot of abuse, but there are valid reasons to own offshore stock.
If you live in a state where you are taxed on your investment earnings, you might feel "double-taxed" if those earnings were already taxed at the corporate level.
* Oxford
* Cambridge
* The University of Law Employee Benefit Trust
[0] e.g. Trinity ~£1bn per https://www.trin.cam.ac.uk/alumni/giving-to-trinity/annual-r..., Gonville and Caius ~£150m per https://www.cai.cam.ac.uk/alumni/campaign-brochure/the-endow...
Which moral argument do you think they are undermining, and what proof do you have of that?
A registered entity in a Caribbean nation is just as benign as a registered entity in a United State.