That's basically what happened when they tried (twice I think ?) to raid Uber offices in France, their boss pressed a kill switch and everything went down in seconds. It completely blocked the investigation.

Afterward Uber helped Macron campaign who then ordered National Financial Prosecutor's office to "stop bothering them" so I don't think anything new happened since.

Edit: Some sources in below replies for infos on both. Turn out I'm wrong for 2nd part it started earlier than his campaign.

There was an interview with Anne Brorhilker, who used to be state's attorney and was investigating in CumEx cases. She stated that it is a huge pain, because you always need to ask the foreign agencies for assistance, which you sometimes simply won't get.

It was a good listen. At first she needed to go empty handed, but then teamed up with competent tech guys. After that the smug faces stating, that the amount of data would be to much to handle for her little department quickly turned into concerned faces.

I'd imagine you'd get done for not being tax compliant. At least in Ireland you have to able to show all tax accounting for the last four years on request by Revenue. If you can't produce this and all the files 'have gone missing' or 'we can't find the cloud keys' I'd would expect to be fined out of existence and ordered to cease trading immediately. So that would be worse that getting dragged through the courts while you pay lawyers to figure out to mitigate any fines or sentences passed down. I think it can even result in prison time for the CEO and other company officers.

> everything being stored in the cloud somewhere

Sounds like it would make it easier for law enforcement. They no longer need a warrant against/for the company they're investigating, just the place where their data is stored. Get the warrant, raid the place and grab the drives, then continue the investigation. Done the right way, the company under investigation wouldn't even notice it.

It depends on the type of business. In the EU, VAT registered companies are usually mandated to have a physical location and local representative within the country of operation. So you can be remote all you want, as long as your company and fiscal representative can be reached at a physical location.

I don't know how it works in other countries, but in the US you likely still need to provide a real address for many purposes (tax, immigration if applicable, etc)

The police could just find the correct targets and raid their home instead.

If everything is synchronised to third party could storage an "office raid" can be as easy as getting a court order telling the cloud provider to make a snapshot of everything stored available to the police.

If you can get access to someone's laptop with SSO login access to the cloud storage (or their email inbox and Slack messages), then you have what you need.

They just demand the data per warrant and if you don’t deliver you go to jail for obstruction of justice

It doesn’t. Especially with multinationals, and doubly so as crypto gains adoption. Hence why the governments of the world are in a panic. Decentralization is a huge threat to bureaucracy since their tools of intimidation and control are less effective.

What do you think "the cloud" is? I'm reminded of an old meme, "the cloud is just someone else's computer". They could raid a data center and seize machines. They could also subpoena data they are looking for.

What a funny naive thinki. Cloud services don't protect from the official authorities. Unless you want to go to jail.

I mean, that would be way easier for the government agencies, no? Just send a subpoena to the service providers, they hand over all the data and you're done?

The authorities asks for access to these online documents? Similarly to how they ask to access to physical documents (they don't break down doors and break locks on file cabinets). If the personel of the company does not disclose some of the online documents, and these documents come up later (e.g. because they are referenced in some of the documents that did get disclosed), the people who did it get charged with tampering with an tax investigation.

Well they certainly do want the revenues from users outside of Ireland

I mean I think the point of the story is that they are pretending not to.

Getting raided can happen to companies of any size, Mullvad comes to mind as an example of a company that's small, European and got raided, but it is incredibly rare. It's hard to overstate how exceptional it is, you need to either be on the police radar with a serious issue, or breaking the tax law considerably, or etc. I think the main reason you see this happen to a lot of American companies is that they expand to Europe, but try to do business the same way they did back home. Both the legal landscape and the moral landscape wrt it are very different in Europe, and trying to willingly evade taxes for example is tended to with a very heavy hand. If I'm not mistaken, that's what's happened to Netflix here: they already got caught evading taxes once, and now there's a suspicion that they're doing it again/still.

A raid is a lot of work and only happens when you know you find something.

For 99,9% of companies, you get audited every 5—25 years by getting a visit from your local tax authority.

Remember: Small/medium companies have comparable companies and you can easily spot the tax dodgers. Or tax dodging is unofficially tolerated to some degree — think restaurants only accepting cash.

Most companies are not as blatantly illegal as Uber..

Large multinational companies are accustomed to openly breaking the law and getting away with it in the USA; when they try to do the same in Europe they are very surprised when the law actually comes after them.

They also raid anyone else they don't like, such as people who run Tor exit nodes... but random small businesses are not in that group.

> Wasn't Uber or some other US company found doing something similar?

Airbnb, they had to pay like 70k of tax a few years ago. There are employees who pay as much tax as single filers lol

They paid 18% less tax in 2016 than in 2013 while the number of flats available on the site went from 30k to 300k

https://www.lesechos.fr/2016/08/airbnb-na-paye-que-69168-eur...

It's hard to accurately measure secretive crimes like this, but the estimates seem to put corporate tax evasion by percentage of GDP at either similar levels between the EU and US or actually higher in the EU.

Given Wirecard I wouldn’t assume the EU equally prosecutes or tracks crimes for EU and non-EU companies.

Literally every single company that can afford to setup things like tax transfer schemes, are actively evading taxes.

It’s mind boggling how widespread it is, how accepted (legal) it is, and how it will seemingly never be fixed.

https://www.somo.nl/the-netherlands-still-a-tax-haven/

That's rich coming from French. Long time ago France Telecom bought Polish top phone network. Immediately rebranded it to Orange (despite the fact that the company had one of the strongest brands on market where it operated).

Unsurprisingly the licensing fees for using Orange brand that the Polish company had to pay to France Telecom amounted to large percentage of taxable profits that the Polish company had. Overt theft from Polish company and Polish taxpayers.

Yeah there's the so called "Dutch Sandwich"[1] which is a well-known tax "planning" methodology that corporates use with the so called "Double Irish" being another one. There's also a slightly less-well known one involving Mauritius and India. They're all ways of moving profits between companies in order to exploit tax treaties that countries put in place. In the case of the Dutch sandwich I think the Netherlands has a treaty with the Netherlands Antilles or something so people have a company in the Netherlands which then shifts things off-shore to the Antilles and avoids tax that way.

It's nonsense of course. Companies should (in my opinion) shoulder their fair share of tax because otherwise that burden falls disproportionately on individual income tax.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_Sandwich

Is it illegal, tho?

It isn't really accepted anywhere, but there is a group of people who will make it their goal in life to get up to any shady practice to try to shortchange or dodge their local host polity to their ultimate advantage. The tax dodge, if you will, becomes something of a pass time and point of pride for them.

This becomes more difficult as more tax authorities better integrate with one another, which admittedly, is something many in in the U.S. fidget over, even if it is realized that the need for it is almost entirely a byproduct of these types of people's actions that necessitate that happening.

yes but it was cancelled after becoming too popular

Emily moves from Paris to Rome and then this happens. Coincidence?

The world of tax is complex. Business exist in many shapes and sizes. So...

- because companies heavily use government resources like roads and stuff.

- because losses can be offset against profits. These tend to be middled out over multiple years. You can port losses to other years.

- a lot of companies (holdings etc.) don't pay out income tax and are basically just letterbox companies. These companies need to pay tax on dividends otherwise they would literally pay zero tax.

Why shouldn't companies pay taxes? Especially since income is taxed already and your average Joe gets screwed way more than the poor downtrodden billion dollar companies.

Any corporation uses roads, mail, police, courts, and other public services, and this usage is not offset by individual income taxes on that corporation's employees, since the employees also use these things. In fact I suspect more resources are spent on serving corporations than serving individual taxpayers - with the important caveat that I am specifically excluding government social insurance programs. But those are often a totally separate tax system.

It is baffling to think that for-profit corporations should be allowed to use public services without paying for them: before a company makes further internal investments with new revenue, it should chip in to society for building the infrastructure that made the revenue possible. A corporate income tax is perfectly natural.

Whether you earn and save a given dollar as a W2 worker or through a business you own seems pretty incidental, right? Your net worth is going up just the same; society has the same interest in containing inequality.

Because governments need money to fund services. They would put a tax on making HN comments if they could get away with it.

A lot of words to say: taxation is theft.

Everything is double, triple, etc taxed. The corp->shareholder thing is an arbitrary point to focus on.

Some amount of revenue must be raised. Suggest an alternative. Not taxing corp profits will result is less overall tax income (it wont be made up in shareholder taxes).

You do know my income has already been taxed? Why am I paying double tax when buying alcohol? Why is my income taxed when the companies revenues were already taxed?

There is no double taxation. Transactions are taxed, not money.

Or never if the stock is owned by a foreign national, charity, sovereign wealth fund, etc.

Reasonable corporate taxes are a net positive for the economy of the county that issues them.

Then you would be in favor of only taxing retained profits. Corporations keep piles of money for future use. It would make sense to allow deductions for dividends distributed to shareholders. But could also fix the stock buyback loophole by not allow deduction.

Why not advocate for taxing only corporations, rather than the more oppressive direction of taxing only humans? Corporations intrinsically run on accounting report paperwork, meaning tax forms are an incremental cost rather than a novel burden. And they receive massive benefits from the state - liability protection, outsized access to the legal system, and often direct subsidies.