That are mostly the smaller companies (at least in Germany). The bigger corporations also avoid taxes, but the legal way and with electronic transactions.
I think this is good news. Companies such as Google and others have been avoiding paying taxes for too long. They do this in ways which up until now were fraudulent but technically legal, by creating fictional companies or by laundering money via havens.
These companies evading taxes are responsible for increased hardship and suffering of a society as well, leeching off of the nations they exist in, and being able to outcompete the honest organizations and people in them. The damages are far greater than the tax avoided. "They are doing it too" isn't a valid excuse either.
They can certainly manage to avoid compliance with at least the spirit of the law when it really matters to them. I guess avoiding paying tax is important enough to engage armies of lawyers and reorganise your corporate structure, while this isn't.
Fairly telling that these corporations that are themselves tax dodging any way they can and then some on a global scale are so draconian against people trying to dodge their taxe regime.
If you ever think of a financial trick to avoid taxes and say "why couldn't companies do X", the answer without fail is "because it's illegal and you aren't aware of the specific law you're violating".
If this was legal all sorts of companies would do this all the time.
That's just the accepted legal term. By definition they both can be the same thing. When the law was written they could have just as easily as gone with tax avoidance as tax evasion.
But in the context of the discussion, avoiding taxes is being used in a negative way by implying that the companies are not paying taxes that they should be paying by whatever criteria society dreams up, such as "fair share". I simply object to this characterization since these companies are following the law until a tax court says otherwise.
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