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Comment by joshfraser | Hacker News Reader

Tax evasion as a service. Target the same legal loopholes that big corporations use to avoid paying taxes like "transfer pricing". You set up the offices and shell corporations in Ireland and the Netherlands for a Double Irish with a Dutch Sandwich. You then share those resources (offices, staff, lawyers, accountants, etc) between your clients & charge a percentage of the tax savings as your fee.

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Fun fact: Tax Evasion means breaking the law to pay less taxes; Tax Avoidance means doing things to pay less tax within the confines of the law.

I'm being intentionally provocative. :)

This won't work. Tax authority will simply not accept tax deductible expenses which allow you to transfer profits to Ireland and will issue you new tax bill.

Why big corporations can get away with this? It comes down to people. Little guy working at tax office doesn't have enough confidence to oppose Apple or Google but will have world of confidence to scrutinize unknown small businesses.

I see companies like this popping up all the time offering services that allow profits to be concealed under some bullshit scheme. It might take a few years before tax authority will catch up but they will eventually find every single client of such company, they will conduct detailed audits and will issue new tax bills with penalties to all involved.

Do you have a specific example of something Apple does that is illegal, but for which the IRS isn't pursuing them?

I didn't say anything about illegal.

I specifically said, tax authority won't accept tax deductions they don't like. They will simply issue you new tax bill and couldn't care less whether what you are doing is legal or not.

It's up to you to challenge their interpretation of law through legal system if you think what you are doing is legal.

By the way, EU’s executive Commission is currently looking into Ireland and says what Apple is doing could be illegal under EU law. If confirmed, Apple will get a huge repayment bill.

source: http://www.news.com.au/finance/business/is-the-apple-tax-dod...

In fact, a french website published an app called "Defiscalisator" (http://www.finansemble.fr/defiscalisator). It aims to optimize things for you in order to pay less taxes.

the irs would hit any partners you use to transfer funds very quickly with deep audits at the very minimum if this gets even a little traction, i'd think

The goal is to get shut down. Best case, you draw enough attention to the issue to create some real reform in our tax system and bring awareness to the fact that we're hurting innovation by giving big companies far better tax rates than startups.

I'm not trying to be "provocative", but do you have any examples of this ever happening? And by that I mean any examples where a company has purposefully broken a law, was shut down and then laws were changed as a direct result? I've seen it happen the other way (technically no laws against it, shut the company down anyway then passed laws against it) but what you're proposing sounds improbable.

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