this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2023
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289
Germany approves global minimum corporate tax (www.reuters.com)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Multinational firms will have to pay a minimum of 15% tax on all of the profits they make worldwide, regardless of where the profits are generated.

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 year ago (2 children)

This is great in theory, but many companies just redirect actual profits back into "expenses" like donations, bonuses, consultancy fees, etc. Whatever writes off more taxes.

This will apply to all such companies and large-scale domestic groups with turnover above 750 million euros ($800 million) per year.

Yeah, OK. If they're doing that kind of turnover the business most certainly has an accounting department and financial "strategy" in place. If Germany wanted to make it real they would have approached it like GDPR fines where it is based on global revenue, not profits.

This looks like political theater to me, and the unanimous party support seems to back that theory, but i don't have enough German ability or the desire to dig further.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's exactly want this law is stopping. Companies will always try to reduce their tax burden which is why this initiative, a tax floor, is global. The law is an effective way of increasing the minimum tax - what you said doesn't really apply.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Multinational firms will have to pay that level of tax on all of the profits they make worldwide, regardless of where the profits are generated.

If I have understood correctly from the article, this tax seems to apply to profits instead of revenue. If that is the case then all this does is justify companies hiring 10 more accountants and lawyers to find more novel ways to launder real corporate profit from exploitation into personal profit. Publicly traded companies might take a small hit to their next annual reports, but private businesses will experience almost no effect at all.

If a company has bought and "loaned" or given their executives cars, phones, food and rent stipends, paid for lavish parties with ~~friends~~ clients, bought out their family's "startup" and put their kids on the payroll, started their own charity that functionally does nothing, and employed people to be their personal ~~butler~~ assistant, and contracted out their everything to other friend's businesses, then those are considered "expenses". The actual profit has been "reinvested back into the business" and the tax is applied to what is basically pocket change because the money has been spent. It doesn't matter that the gold toilet in the CEO's personal office bathroom isn't necessary, it still counts as an expense. The core problem persists, the only thing it just changes the numbers on the documents.

"Reducing tax" is how companies strengthen social imbalance by consolidating power amongst a small group of people and exploit global markets. It's not something to write off as an understandable necessity. This is why GDPR specifically targetted revenue instead of profits as the base value.

But it's late and I may have missed a key phrase or three in the article. That also happens.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

If a company has bought and “loaned” or given their executives cars, phones, food and rent stipends, paid for lavish parties with friends clients, bought out their family’s “startup” and put their kids on the payroll, started their own charity that functionally does nothing, and employed people to be their personal butler assistant, and contracted out their everything to other friend’s businesses, then those are considered “expenses”. The actual profit has been “reinvested back into the business” and the tax is applied to what is basically pocket change because the money has been spent. It doesn’t matter that the gold toilet in the CEO’s personal office bathroom isn’t necessary, it still counts as an expense. The core problem persists, the only thing it just changes the numbers on the documents.

The really annoying thing is this shit doesn't fly for small businesses. I worked as an accountant for over ten years, for SME's (small and medium enterprises), and there were extensive rules on what was and wasn't allowed as an expense for tax purposes. There's tax rules on cars, phones, etc given to executives that ensure somebody is paying tax on it, and there's tax rules on capital investment/reinvestment in the business that separates it from business expenses for tax purposes (basically, tax is generally calculated based on what's on the profit&loss, not the balance sheet, and investment is a balance sheet item).

A lot of good could be done by ensuring large businesses are forced to comply by the same tax rules as small ones - and accountants for large businesses that try to hide the owner's personal expenditure amongst business expenditure should be held to the same standards as accountants for small businesses. If I'd tried to deliberately pass off a gold toilet as a business expense for a client, I wouldn't just have gotten fired. I'd have gotten arrested for fraud. Accountancy is a regulated profession, but the big accountancy companies often just ignore the regulations that would get a smaller company in a lot of trouble.

So yeah, I broadly agree with you. This move by Germany is meaningless without some serious overhaul of how tax laws apply (or don't apply) to large corporations and their accountants. Closing all the loopholes so there's no legal route to reducing profit without genuine business expenses (not fake, made-up "expenses") would make it much harder for companies to bend the rules to their favour.

~Disclaimer: all the above is based on my experience with accountancy in my own country. Legislation and tax rules vary by geography.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It's embarrassing you're an accountant and yet indulge in conspiratorial thinking. I've worked in and audited small, medium and large companies. Public companies have the strictest controls around personal spending of company resources. All public companies have to comply with SOX. I've never seen a private company voluntarily comply with that standard.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Please read my disclaimer. I'm not from the US, and my experience is based on accountancy in my own country. No company in my country complies with SOX, because that's a US law and doesn't apply to the rest of the world.

While large corporations in this country are audited, they use the large auditors who have in fact been found to have done some pretty dodgy shit that a small auditor or accountant would not have gotten away with, while the regulators turn a blind eye. The large auditors also enable large companies to use tax loopholes that are not available to small businesses, so my point that closing the loopholes would make a big difference stands. And sure, the smaller accountants and auditors do this kind of crap too (corruption exists everwhere) - but the difference is that they're held to account when they get caught. It is factually the case that those with more money don't have to play by the same rules as everyone else.

I'm also not an accountant anymore. Did it for ten years and came to absolutely hate it as more of my time was spent on larger businesses. I loved working for the little guys, as overall I found them more reasonable. I never worked on any public companies, but I did work on a few charities (which have many similar rules to public companies in this country), and the corruption amongst the leadership was directly proportional to the size of the charity. There's one major charity I won't donate to anymore because I know just how much corruption there is at the top.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Plenty of known loopholes for tax avoidance.

Used to work for a company that made killer profit, but 85-90% of it was funneled to the parent company to pay for the leverage of the PE investors who bought the company for 10x their EBITDA. Say we made 100 million EBITDA, the official result was around 10-15 million, and was the basis for our taxation.

All this money was paid as various fees and licenses and was calculated into the budget the year before. We had specific goals that we needed to hit and, and bonus payment was based on these goals. Our collective bonuses was a drop in the ocean compared to the result of the company.

The parent company in Germany then had at least three levels of holding companies, all incorporated in Luxembourg, between them and the owners.

Was a fun place to work when we got sold as suddenly there were som extra rounds of bonuses to go around as carrots for us to stay on during the sale, and even more stay-on bonuses for those who staid on after the sale.

According to my boss at the time - the perk of being in a PE backed company.

Wouldn’t be surprised if they’re up for sales again next year.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If I’d tried to deliberately pass off a gold toilet as a business expense for a client, I wouldn’t just have gotten fired

But I'm guessing you probably wouldn't think twice about an invoice for a contracted architecture firm for renovation plans, or a plumber's parts and labor for extensive work. It's not like accountants are inspecting all the invoices and checking the boss' private bathroom for signs of excessively expensive and gaudy taste. Especially if you're a contracted third party. Do you even technically need to be on the same continent?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Inspecting every invoice? No. Inspecting large invoices? Yes. Inspecting large invoices not related to cost-of-sales? Yes. For one of our larger clients, their annual audit took 75% of the accountancy staff, in addition to the auditing staff, because every invoice over a certain threshold had to be looked at.

And if I'd seen an invoice for extensive renovations where some of the parts purchased looked questionable (like a solid gold toilet), I absolutely wouldn't have taken that on faith as a genuine business expense that should be used to reduce profit, and would have questioned it. If there was a huge payment going out and no invoice to support it, I wouldn't have taken it on faith that was a business expense. While it would have been up to my boss at the time whether it was included, it would have been negligent of me to see a massive invoice for something obviously excessive and not raise a query about its validity.

And yes, if there were questions about whether something large and excessive had genuinely been installed in the office rather than the business owner's private home (and a gold toilet would invite questions like that), my boss would have asked to go and have a look before signing off on it being a business expense. And even then, if the gold toilet was in the business owner's work office, it would likely still have been considered personal expenditure when it's quite clearly excessive and quite clearly only for him personally. We have tax rules in this country that where a proportion of a business expense is determined to be personal in nature, it gets added back into the profit when the tax is calculated. While typically this is stuff like a business owner using the company van to run personal errands, or a farmer where part of the electricity and water use for the whole property applies to the living quarters (this is often estimated, like saying "5% of motor expenses, 10% of power and water, etc", but the principle is that if a percentage is personal not business, then it's not deductible for tax purposes), it would also apply to the inclusion of a gold toilet for personal use in an otherwise business-related office renovation.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Understood! Thanks for the detailed insight, I appreciate it. I have witnessed business excess but I'm not in the financial professions, so the exact mechanics of how they get away with it were somewhat opaque to me. Breaking it up into small invoices across multiple companies and payments makes perfect sense though.

It's also nice to know there are accountants who take this seriously enough to personally check.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

No problem! :)

I think there genuinely is an issue where large businesses just aren't checked as thoroughly as small ones. It's much easier to check every invoice over X when there's only a few thousand invoices, compared to when there's millions or even hundreds of millions of invoices. There's also the fact that the value of X varies based on the size of the business. I had a few really tiny clients where X was 10, because for the size of the business and the revenue they did, 10 was significant. There were others where X was 1000. Obviously at both of those thresholds, a gold toilet is going to stick out - and for the tiny business, would probably also trigger a money laundering/fraud report (no accountant-client confidentiality when financial crimes are being committed. This is another area where the big firms are given a lot of leeway that small ones are not).

So I can definitely see how for a megacorporation, the auditor may well conclude that no invoice for less than 1,000,000 is worth the effort of looking at, and it becomes quite easy to start sneaking through those gold toilets on <1,000,000 invoices if you know the auditor isn't going to look at them.

As much as I have my doubts about AI, I think accountancy and audit is one of those professions where it could be a useful tool. If an AI could run through all the invoices and just flag the ones that look weird, regardless of value, for a human to take a closer look at, it would make a measurable difference - assuming a sufficiently unbiased and correctly trained AI, of course!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

All nations are a sham. The new world is coming! Be part of the change for the natural flag of humanity as a whole.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

🤖 I'm a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles:

Click here to see the summaryBERLIN, Nov 10 (Reuters) - The German parliament on Friday approved the implementation of a global minimum corporate tax, as part of an international deal to ensure large companies pay a minimum tax rate of 15%.

In 2021 almost 140 countries agreed to an Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development deal they are meant to implement from next year to prevent big companies like Alphabet's Google (GOOGL.O) or Amazon (AMZN.O) avoiding taxation by transferring profits to low-tax countries.

The increase is expected to raise $220 billion globally for governments strapped for cash after the COVID-19 pandemic and struggling to ride out a cost-of-living crisis, although the ratification process has hit hurdles in various countries.

Last December the European Union member states agreed on a common directive to ensure uniform implementation of the tax within the EU, and that directive must be passed into national law in all EU countries by the end of the year.

The Ministry of Finance estimated earlier this year that additional tax revenue of 910 million euros could be expected in Germany from 2026.

In 2027 and 2028, the tax is forecast to bring in 535 and 285 million euros, respectively.

Saved 26% of original text.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Seems kind of complicated to me. Why don't countries just unilaterally put tarriffs on imports from countries with (corporate) income taxes that are too low, as well as countries that don't also have similar tariffs?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Global tax is complicated. A reprisal tariff regime would be way way way more complicated. The US doesn't want to be in a position where it's levying 50% tariffs on Guinness because Ireland's corporate tax rate is 12.5%. How do you know that tariff is fair and would the WTO even recognize uneven tax rates as a sanctionable offense?

This is a carrot vs stick approach.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Hmmm makes me question the benefit of the WTO.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What will realistically happen?

Nothing. Companies will just spend a hair more money finding ways to circumvent the new taxes. And, if the new taxes were not easily circumvented- they would just relocate the company to another country with lower taxes.

In the end, the consumer is paying the taxes, and not the company itself, either way.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago

"what's the point of introducing new taxes against the rich? They'll just find ways to avoid it so let's just not do anything that might harm their profit margins or else it'll make the poor even poorer"

Then wtf is the solution? Everybody says this whenever higher taxes for corporations and the rich is brought up, that they'll just find new ways to avoid touching their precious profits. Should everyone just collectively do nothing because "they'll find ways to avoid it so why bother"

This defeatist attitude pisses me off, something needs to be done to curb this bullshit. Literally no one needs or deserves hundreds of millions, let alone billions of dollars, and this cancerous "profits must go up every year or your company is a failure" needs to fucking die already. Why do companies making hundreds of millions to billions of dollars in profit need more fucking money? Why can't being rich af and literally not being able to spend your net worth in a single lifetime be enough?

We went from 1 salary at a factory being enough to raise a family, buy a house, buy a car, and go for a yearly vacation being normal to even 2 highly educated people working together and sharing expenses barely being able to afford a fucking house. Now the average person is expected to give a giant portion of their monthly earnings to pay off some parasitic landlords mortgage plus some profit for the "trouble" of being a fucking parasite.

Eat the fucking rich. Enough is enough.