These tax dodges are corporate shenanigans, and to me it’s no different than tax evasion.
Its completely messed up, but that's the current rules of the system. Without going into politics, they play by the stretched rules.
He who has the gold, makes the rules.
The good old monopoly of violence. Too bad Max Weber is not in the public discussion as much as he should be, he “guessed” a lot of things too damned right in his “Economy and Society”, imho it is the defining book of our modern society, with Marx’s “Capital” a close second.
Is the IRS really auditing people over $1000 in taxes (under $4000 of revenue/income)?
Once it gets into 7-8 figures, you can VERY easily pay proportionately less than the poor suckers caught in the 10-500K net.
> On the one hand, the IRS said, auditing poor taxpayers is a lot easier: The agency uses relatively low-level employees to audit returns for low-income taxpayers who claim the earned income tax credit. The audits — of which there were about 380,000 last year, accounting for 39% of the total the IRS conducted — are done by mail and don’t take too much staff time, either. They are “the most efficient use of available IRS examination resources,” Rettig’s report says.
https://www.propublica.org/article/earned-income-tax-credit-...
> Since Smick, who is taking classes toward a bachelor’s degree, and her husband, a chef, together earned around $33,000 in 2017, about $2,000 of that refund would come from the earned income tax credit. [...] But no refund came. Instead, she got a letter from the IRS saying it was “conducting a thorough review” of her return.
https://www.propublica.org/article/whos-afraid-of-the-irs-no...
> the same year that Facebook started moving profits to Ireland, the IRS launched a team to crack down on deals like that. The effort started aggressively. [...] But shortly after the IRS showed this new ambition, Republicans in Congress, after taking the House in 2010, began forcing cuts to the IRS’ budget. Over the years, as Facebook grew into one of the world’s largest companies, with 2 billion users, the IRS was shrinking. By the time the IRS finally took on Facebook over its Irish deal a few years later, the agency was in over its head.
A large proportion of the US population commits some sort of low level tax evasion- unreported income, deductions that never happened, personal expenses as business deductions, claiming dependents, etc. The vast majority will never see any enforcement whatsoever. By contrast the returns of a major corporation like Facebook are held up to an extreme degree of scrutiny.
That there is a net overpayment of taxes due to people not claiming deductions, not collecting refunds due etc. etc.
(not sure how true this is, simply something I read).
If the IRS wins their suit then it will be shown to be no different than tax evasion in this case though :-)