Ask HN: How hard would an offshore tax avoidance as a service be?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11671883

by Captainbana • 10 years ago

17 5 10 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

If I had the resources, I would have setup a Panama account to avoid (not evade) taxes. Is it possible this can be made into a startup which completely or semi automated the process?

edwcar13• 10 years ago

Those accounts have lawyers and financial experts crossing all the t's and dotting every i. If you were going to automate this then your servers would need to be hosted somewhere in Panama since they are using Panama law to build these shell companies.

Then hire a team of Panama lawyers to file the documents and financial experts to manage the money that is being "hidden".

I believe the only thing you could do to automate the process is build a site like rocketlawyer.com and have people file it that way and then follow up a consultation call to walk them through the rest of the process.

JacobAldridge• 10 years ago

Check out Nomad Capitalist (http://nomadcapitalist.com) and Streber (https://www.streber.st) for some good information on companies doing this.

Two relevant points from my research / understanding: 1) Most jurisdictions either need or like some degree of physical presence, either a client or their agent. It's not a simple 100% online solution, especially if a bank account is required.

2) There's a big difference between multi-nationals who can properly avoid taxes this way, and individuals and small businesses who get trapped by Residency (and, for the US and Eritrea, Citizenship) requirements. For someone in The US, UK, Australia, much of Europe etc, it's not as simple as running revenue through an offshore company and account to legally avoid tax. Your country of residency will generally consider that a 'Controlled Foreign Company' (CFC) and tax you as if it were a local company anyway.

My possible future plans, for example, would require moving my family to another country before I'd actually benefit from any tax reduction.

tmaly• 10 years ago

I think it would be really hard, but if you look at a smaller slice of the problem, there might be something else you could provide.

What do the lawyers that provide this do? What aspects of what they do are repetitive and manual? Can you build a service that automates just that and then sell it to the lawyers?

lumberjack• 10 years ago

A comment pertaining to startup "common sense": You clearly have no domain knowledge. How do you presume you could even identify whether there was a market opportunity, let alone contribute anything to any startup you might found? This is something some law firms in some specific countries might attempt.

Now regarding your question, your first stop should be a notary that deals in estate management, particularly somebody who deals with inheritance a lot. Through their job they come across all kinds of weird tax schemes regularly and would be up to date on the topic.

philiphodgen• 10 years ago

I do this in my day job -- international tax lawyer.

As the saying goes, "science may one day accomplish this, but it hasn't done so yet." In theory you can write enough code and SOPs to mirror the laws of multiple countries.

Unfortunately, laws change.

Further, even if the laws remain static, the facts change. People do the weirdest thing -- they change their minds, they do new stuff. Your code and SOPs will have to be adapted.

In theory you can write code and SOPs to handle current law, keep up with changes in the law, and accommodate human frailties, indecision, and mistakes.

Then in order to make the code and SOPs profitable, you must push enough customers through the pipeline at a high enough price in order to make a profit.

It is here that I think you fail in your quest. I happen to know -- from talking to trustees in the Cook Islands -- the approximate number of asset protection trusts established every year. It is a number whose small size surprised me. This tells me the market for international business structures is small.

The market is especially small after you chase away all of the bullshit artists who want to do skanky stuff offshore. Those doors are closing all the time. It's that "the law changes" thing I talked about.

So. Legitimate users of offshore structures. Small number.

Your cost to build a system with software instead of humans. Big number.

The actual tax benefits to companies like those on HN that are larger than a breadbox and smaller than the Hoover Dam -- not a big economic benefit to the income statement. (Hint: it involves the time value of money, which means that you have to be pushing a lot of dollars through the pipes to make the present value/future value numbers to look like "jackpot!").

Sorry. I'm probably just a crusty old incumbent ripe for disruption.

Or there is another possibility -- humans, even at $1,000/hour, are cheaper than code.

Ask HN: How hard would an offshore tax avoidance as a service be?

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