<story><title>The Double Irish Dutch Sandwich: End of a Tax Evasion Strategy</title><url>https://conversableeconomist.com/2024/09/12/the-double-irish-dutch-sandwich-end-of-a-tax-evasion-strategy/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>gwd</author><text>&amp;gt; The obvious loss is to government revenue, but the more subtle and still very real loss is the diversion of high-powered talent from what could have been gains in efficiency and productivity to focus instead on corporate reorganizations and tax evasion games.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s also a loss to all of us who find ourselves owning a &amp;quot;foreign&amp;quot; corporation for legitimate reasons, and having to do a lot of work proving that we&amp;#x27;re not playing shell games.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m an American living in the UK; I&amp;#x27;ve started what&amp;#x27;s now a one-man bootstrapped company and it just makes sense for it to be incorporated in the UK.  I don&amp;#x27;t mind paying taxes, but I don&amp;#x27;t want to have to pay them twice.  UK taxes are generally higher than US taxes, and there are tax treaties to avoid double taxation, so no problem, right?&lt;p&gt;Wrong.  First, if a US citizen owns more than 10% of a foreign corporation, there&amp;#x27;s an insanely complicated form you have to fill out, two pages of which are incomprehensible questions (&amp;quot;Is your company considered an X corporation under sections Y and Z of the Blablablah act?&amp;quot;) that simply require an expert to fill out.&lt;p&gt;Secondly, if a US citizens owns more than &lt;i&gt;50%&lt;/i&gt; of a foreign company, by default, income from that company counts as personal income, &lt;i&gt;but taxes paid by the company to another government don&amp;#x27;t count as personal taxes&lt;/i&gt;.  You can get around this, apparently, but it&amp;#x27;s even more complicated.&lt;p&gt;So because of [REDACTED] lawyers and accountants that have come up with these schemes, I have to spend precious starting capital to a bunch of accountants to prove I&amp;#x27;m not evading taxes, rather than actually doing something useful with that money (and that accountant doing something more useful with their time).</text></comment>
<story><title>The Double Irish Dutch Sandwich: End of a Tax Evasion Strategy</title><url>https://conversableeconomist.com/2024/09/12/the-double-irish-dutch-sandwich-end-of-a-tax-evasion-strategy/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>sanj</author><text>“ The obvious loss is to government revenue, but the more subtle and still very real loss is the diversion of high-powered talent from what could have been gains in efficiency and productivity to focus instead on corporate reorganizations and tax evasion games.”&lt;p&gt;I’d expect very little overlap between those talent pools.</text></comment>