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Comment by OJFord | Hacker News Reader

And I suppose you voluntarily pay more tax than you need to?

"He" is not a for-profit corporation, but a human person. Corporations aren't people no matter how much dollars go into PR efforts to tell people otherwise. As such, them not paying their part to the society is damaging no matter how many personal appeals you do.

Please stop humanizing corporations to make them get away with not paying their part.

It seems like the point is that we’d be naive to expect a corporation, presumably governed by rational actors working to maximize profits, to pay more taxes than the minimum.

Regular citizens do not have the opportunity to successfully lobby for tax avoidance loopholes to be created and maintained for their benefit, so responding to a point about unequal advantages to corporations with a comment about rational accounting is unhelpful.

Is your position that corporations don't have an unjust advantage, or that the unjust advantage is okay and people shouldn't complain about it?

Neither -- I'm not comparing citizens and corporations. I'm simply saying that it's naive to expect a company to voluntarily pay more taxes than is required. They will not pay more taxes than required until the laws are changed.

Notice that I haven't made a claim that corporations should be treated as individuals, or that corporations do or don't have an unjust advantage, or that having an unjust advantage is okay.

I'm not humanising corporations, I hate it when they make matey communications and kick myself if I catch myself referring to a (singular) company as 'they'.

But the terms avoidance and evasion are the same for corporate taxation as they are for personal tax. The desire to not pay more than necessary is also the same, and that seems entirely rational.

If you want a company to pay more tax (and it's not presently breaking laws - not evading tax) then you should want legislation to change. 'Company X should donate to the my country's treasury' (pay more tax than it needs to, not avoid it) is not a compelling argument for my (fictional) company any more than it is for my personal liability.

There is a pretty clear difference, to me, between saying "this practice is obviously wrong, but technically legal--and we should work to change that," and lauding the company's actions as "good accounting," scolding people for confusing the act of successfully evading paying taxes with "tax evasion" as though this particular bit of legal jargon were shedding light on anything for non-accountants, and carrying water for companies that are not mere passive actors who benefit from a bizarre tax code with inexplicable but convenient loopholes, but rather actively lobby for tax laws to be changed to benefit them (something I, as an individual without billions of dollars to my name, could not effectively do even if I wanted to).

I don't think there's much that's 'obviously' right or wrong in economic policies or tax law, and certainly companies that would fare worse under your proposed changes are the wrong target for urges of change.

Or any legislation really, that's the point of case law, a particular circumstance wasn't anticipated, so there's some interpretation and umming and ahing, and thenceforth that example's able to be used to steer the next.

Online service companies (for example) operating over multiple physical territories, not really 'in' any more than the other, weren't anticipated, the broad strokes of the way they're taxed predates them. It makes sense to advocate for some fundamental change that reimagines how to effectively tax them (I wouldn't call it 'obviously' necessary, but it's a sensible argument worthy of debate) - but it's a waste of breath to expect such companies to volunteer extra tax not required of them.

The fact that for you "should online companies pay taxes?" is a subject worthy of debate indicates such a vast gulf between our positions that there's really nothing to discuss, I think. Certainly the idea that Google is not "in" any particular country seems pretty strange to me, but if that is indeed your position then clearly it should pay tax in all of those countries, not none.

Not 'should they pay taxes' (of course, those which are owed, not doing so is evasion and illegal) but 'how should they be taxed'.

Tax laws apply to them, but pretty much (IANA tax professional btw) aren't setup for online companies and haven't changed (in rough form) since they existed.

Profit based taxation doesn't work if you can just continually reinvest revenue and not declare a profit. (Not unique to online cos of course, but perhaps more prevalent? Maybe more linked to high R&D cos in general.)

Defining where a sale was conducted is messy if your headquarters, accounting dept., tech dept., servers, TLD, customer, self-identity, ... can all be in different jurisdictions.

Etc. ad nauseam. That's what's up for debate.

I think we'd be happy with the same outcome, I just don't think it's worth appealing to companies to ignore the bottom line and pay tax to a level that's higher than required (and so not defined) but that 'we' (you'll never please everyone, so pluck a number out of the air) will be happy with.

> Corporations aren't people no matter how much dollars go into PR efforts to tell people otherwise.

It's not PR efforts, it's literally the law.

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