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Massive Data Leak Reveals How the Ultra Rich Hide Their Wealth
bshell writes "According to the CBC, there was a massive leak of 'files containing information on over 120,000 offshore entities — including shell corporations and legal structures known as trusts — involving people in over 170 countries. The leak amounts to 260 gigabytes of data, or 162 times larger than the U.S. State Department cables published by WikiLeaks in 2010...In many cases, the leaked documents expose insider details of how agents would incorporate companies in Caribbean and South Pacific micro-states on behalf of wealthy clients, then assign front people called "nominees" to serve, on paper, as directors and shareholders for the corporations — disguising the companies' true owners.' Makes a good read and there are some good interactive components. Perhaps Slashdot readers can figure out how the source of the leak, the D.C.-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists got their hands on this data."
this cannot end well.
Self entitled wealthy bastards go to great lengths to avoid paying taxes. Nobody at all is surprised.
We have no problem asking service men and women to sacrifice time with their families, their personal well being and their lives...all under the banner of patriotism. Yet when we ask the wealthy to sacrifice for their country in the form of simply paying their taxes they hide it in off shore accounts and attack those who question this as "redistributors".
Blow the whistle and blow it loud on these cringing cowards.
http://www.ted.com/talks/lawrence_lessig_we_the_people_and_the_republic_we_must_reclaim.html
In this case I'd have to say, "who care how they got their hands on this data" and hope they do more work like this.
Eat the rich.
Given that there are interoffice emails in the stream, that implies that someone was able to access:
1. the mail server archive/backup
2. the mail server's scrubber (whatever they call the thing that scans email for sensitive info).
Do they all share a mailhost or something like that?
You'd think a guy moving his accounts offshore for the tax break had just been awarded the Medal of Honor! It's a badge of honor to a lot of people that you avoid paying taxes by any means necessary.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
The files contain information on over 120,000 offshore entities — including shell corporations and legal structures known as trusts — involving people in over 170 countries.
Oh, no no no, tax evasion for the ultra rich that can play international games isn't the reason the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. No! From Forbes' response to the viral video "Wealth Inequality in America" they say:
Look — we’re moving into the opening years of an economic revolution. The floods of Big Data pouring from the Internet and related technologies are washing away the foundational reasons for the existence of several of our most critical – and comforting – societal structures, potentially changing forever the very notion of what a company is, what a job is, what a brand is, what an educational degree means, and how we’ll work and govern and care for ourselves while attempting to live long and prosper. Almost every part of our existence is being restructured, and quickly, by the stunning power of nearly infinite information.
Don't you see? It's not tax evasion or unfair taxation, it's just the magical power of the internet. Stop asking questions and demanding an equal opportunity to skirt income laws! It's "Big Data" that's changing things rapidly and excitingly. Stop fighting the Economic Revolution!
What an absolute crock of shit.
My work here is dung.
so.... Occupy Wallstreet is still just a bunch of lazy malcontent college hippies?
Free society is incompatible with individuals wielding thousands or millions of times more unchecked power than others.
Nice and all to see the info come out but seriously, with that much money and that many wealthy, influential people involved, what is going to happen with this information? Nothing. A couple of hippies are going to protest against the 1% thingy while texting from their iPhone 5, be discredited, a couple of journalists are going to get vanished, the whole thing will get swept under the rug of the media coverage of an imminent war with North Korea. Problem solved. Damned i'm too young to be this jadded
Perhaps Slashdot readers can figure out how the source of the leak, the D.C.-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists got their hands on this data.
The story on the CBC national news last night suggested that it was snail-mailed anonymously on a portable hard drive to a DC based journalist. This doesn't explain where the data ultimately came from, but does explain how the ICIJ came to have it.
The husband of a Senator has been named in the leak thus far (who is a high profile class action lawyer), and his Senator wife was named as the beneficiary of the accounts. This is the same Senate that had a member (Patrick Brazeau) charged with both sexual and vanilla assault while also under investigation for expenses claimed. While we Canadians sat around scratching our heads about how to get rid of the lifetime appointed Senators, he then had the audacity to April Fools tweet his resignation, only to thumb his nose at us the next day. I'm thinking about sharpening the tines on my pitchfork right now...this adds fuel to the fire.
Whoever got this should be considered a hero. Let's hope they keep going.
I wonder who collected these records in the first place? Either it's all from the same business or someone collected it across many such businesses. In that latter case, it could be a government spy agency with resources or a particularly powerful and well organized blackmailer.
100,000 shell companies over thirty years is significant but not, I think, a large share of the overall market. I gather that these sorts of businesses process millions of new shell companies a year.
It'll be interesting to see who gets caught as a result.
I've been looking for a walkthrough for hiding my wealth in low-tax countries. The eHow article wasn't cutting it. I'm thinking of sending my gazillion dollars to the Bahamas.
sudo make me a sandwich
Relationship is a net loss?
I guess you don't walk on sidewalks, drive on roads, use public infrastructure or enjoy clean water.
electricity? phones?
mmm hmmmm....
Well yes, we've always known that they do, but now we have some of their names, along with where the money is and how it got there, and in some cases, at least, it's pretty clear that some nations' domestic taxation and monetary laws were violated in the process of moving money to offshore accounts. With that information, the taxation authorities of a number of sovereign states can either a. swoop in and seize the money from offshore accounts or b. simply seize domestic assets to make up for the taxes owed.
Of course, few if any taxation authorities will do that, because, at the end of the day, most of them probably already had the information, but are either complicit or too cowed to move in.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The biggest question I have, now that the general public is also aware of how the ultra rich "hide" their money (and oftentimes to avoid taxation):
What are the politicians going to do to address these loopholes?
They may just realise that if they tried that, they'd be going up against an army of the highest-paid lawyers in the world. The case could drag on for a decade.
Want to know how the super wealthy "hide" their money in off shore accounts? Call an off shore bank and ask? They'll be happy to tell you. For a couple hundred bucks they'll even set up the company for you and open an account.
Problem is, you'll need to get money into your account somehow. To do so will take a wire transfer that the IRS will be notified about. Going the other direction would also take a wire transfer, that the IRS will be notified about.
Here's a radio show about it:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/07/27/157499893/episode-390-we-set-up-an-offshore-company-in-a-tax-haven
Also, it doesn't let you magically hide money from the IRS like most people think:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/09/18/161358307/episode-403-what-can-we-do-with-our-shell-companies
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
If you make less than $40k your relationship with the government is a big gain for you.
Don't forget the part about not getting murdered for your wallet by the local thugs.
Sounds great! Where do *I* sign up?
That only works until somebody like Castro (or Chavez) comes along and locks the doors to all the island banks.... And TAKES all their stashed money! Hence the REAL reason the USA dislikes him so much.
Imagined class warfare?
As Warren Buffet stated âoeThereâ(TM)s class warfare, all right, but itâ(TM)s my class, the rich class, thatâ(TM)s making war, and weâ(TM)re winning.â
You know who pits Americans against each other? The richest few. They want you feeling superior to those who make a little less than you, lest you both realize you should fight together to improve your station in life.
Get their hands on this data to then make a boycott app for the smartphones so we know who to not do business with.
If you spent your time working productively, instead of wasting it boycotting productive people, maybe you'd make some money yourself.
Shakespeare had a solution for that.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
According to the report I just heard on the BBC World News, estimates place the total value of these hidden assets around $32 trillion.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
As I said, they are cowed. If they accepted the cases could drag on for years, and pursued them against a substantial fraction of super-rich tax evaders, the ultimate effect would to chill the desire to evade taxes. It would cost significant amounts of money to begin with, but we're talking about hundreds of billions of dollars apparently nestled in offshore accounts here, so I think the prize is worth the effort. That some crimes are tough to prosecute doesn't mean they shouldn't be prosecuted.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I'm sure that the US Government will find grounds to classify private banking documents.
Probably under the "embarrassing to someone important" clause.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Whoever leaked this is a lot smarter than Assange and the Wikileak's lot, who seem to be in it as much out of arrogant displays of "gotcha!" as anything else. This one was done a lot more quietly, so that those effected by the revelations can't try to turn this around and go after those that did the leaking.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
More importantly, who keeps the tens of thousands of employees from stealing from your companies. Who keeps all those employees safely returning to work each day??
That was the KEY vision Henry Ford had... That you couldn't run a company off the least cost labor and have everybody AROUND your employees live in shit. His high wages were to keep more productive employees... And force them to pull up the other people around them... Very Victorian values.
The Republicans have not yet abolished basic government services.
Some people just don't want to pay taxes.
Most people want to pay only the minimum amount of taxes that they are legally required to pay. Jackson/Hewitt and HR Block base their entire businesses on this.
Most people talk a good talk about how taxes do so much for everyone and are such a wonderful thing, but they are usually referring to taxes paid by other people and not themselves. Very few of these people add a few hundred dollars to their tax payments just to help promote the general welfare, etc.
Call them simply what they are: Leeches. Taking everything civilized society has to offer (such as no roving hordes stringing up the filthy rich), but give nothing back but excrement.
Recall long ago when the US State Department cables thing was going on that Wikileaks said they had something MUCH MUCH bigger. I wonder if this is what they had to offer. They said it would embarass and damage a lot of people and it kind of sounds like this. It would seem like enough to keep honest law enforcement and tax offices business for a decade. (Note that I said "honest" because we generally know how it will play out in the U.S. We'll hear things like "too big to prosecute" and massive offers like 10 cents to the dollar or less.)
The flat tax is one of those things that sound great in a sound bite but are unworkable in reality. And besides, a flat tax is inherently regressive because the wealthy spend a much smaller percentage of income on necessities than poor and middle income people.
Problem is, you'll need to get money into your account somehow. To do so will take a wire transfer that the IRS will be notified about. Going the other direction would also take a wire transfer, that the IRS will be notified about.
Your "non-story" assertion is a bit short sighted from what I know ... if you divert all your income to Ireland or the Netherlands you can get it there nearly tax free. What you perceive as a hard time getting your money to the states is trivial if you find someone who will accept those accounts as collateral for you to borrow against. Oftentimes, the rate of the loan is lower than what you would lose getting hit with capital gains taxes in the US. On top of that, you can put that money in Ireland into a highly rated international fund to cut that loan rate down. Just because you had enough money, you get to skirt tax law enacted by our democratically elected politicians. Congratulations, you're a dick and I'm sure you can blame the socialists and "the system" for forcing you to do this and I'm sure you'll ask me if I donate extra money when I'm doing my taxes -- I don't. But I sure the hell don't tell my employer that I actually have accounts in Grand Cayman and they'll be moving 75% of my paycheck there for me and I'll take 25% of it here so I get a huge rebate for living below the poverty line while building bigger assets in the Caribbean.
... I can't wait for the bean counters to poor over all this data and find some of the other pieces. Either give me and every other equal citizen the same rights to avoid taxes or shut this crap down.
These offshore accounts? This is just one piece of a very large puzzle
My work here is dung.
I put all my money in an offshore account in Cyprus. I am pretty sure it is all tucked away and safe there.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
And many would like to pay next to nothing and still enjoy all the benefits of a functioning democracy.
We call those people freeloaders.
One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel / the next it's rolling over me / I can get back on / I can get back on
Some people refuse to change the tax code and get rid of the 4,825,025 loopholes that exist today.
Most people don't want a change to the tax code to remove the dozen or so "loopholes" that they use. Enough people's set of a dozen will create a union of 4,000,000.
I question the fairness of such modifications anyway. Many tax "loopholes" are created as a means of social engineering. For example, the mortgage interest deduction. It was created to promote home ownership. Many people (myself included) considered this deduction when I decided to buy a house. Doesn't it seem a bit unfair to tell people "buy a house, here, we'll sweeten the pot to help you", and then say "you're a tax cheat because you use a loophole and we're taking it away"? This fairness issue exists with any long-term investment based deductions where someone makes a 30 year decision based on existing policy. Things like "buy a green car and get an immediate deduction" don't have that problem.
Of course, the tax loophole cleaner-uppers have a bit of a tough row to hoe when they label their proposals like 'fair tax' and then misrepresent the percentages and that it really hits a lot of people that aren't their target. They tell people that they'll be better off with the new tax and hope that most people don't bother running the numbers to see for themselves. (Every "fair tax" that I've seen would raise my taxes by a considerable amount, and I'm certainly not in the target zone for the hated wealthy.)
Wait, where do you live where rule by the intelligent has actually been tried? From where I'm standing, it looks like your average high school student knows more about science and technology than half of Congress, and it looks like most of them don't even have enough intelligence to learn about these subjects before legislating on them. Intelligent, indeed.
I'm pretty sure we live on a planet that is largely ruled by the lawyers. This is why we have complex bodies of law designed to be utterly impenetrable for the average person. Lawyers create laws designed so that everyone will have need of their services in the future. The result is that the laws are written not by people who actually understand anything about the real world, but rather by people who mostly only understand the law.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Sounds interesting... but there's very little information here. They list about 20 names of people I haven't heard of mostly in 3rd world countries. Where are all the US citizens? The Euro zone? Name names, give us account balances... Put the data on the pirate bay and I'll start believing this.
If you are taking in 40% of the income of the entire nation, you should expect to pay 40% of the tax of that entire nation.
And since the very poor already can't eat much less pay taxes, you should probably expect to pay 41% of the taxes.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
If you are taking in 40% of the income of the entire nation, you should expect to pay 40% of the tax of that entire nation.
From here, for 2009 the top 1% by percentile paid 36.73% of the income taxes. The top 50% paid 97.75%.
That's not exactly what you said, so let's look here for 2010. From table 1, we see that the top 10% of filers earned 45% of the total income collectively and paid 71% of the income taxes. That's much more than your 40%/40% ratio.
The top 1% paid an average rate of 23.39%. Not 0%, not 15%. They had 18.9% of the total income but paid 37.4% of the income tax revenues. Almost double what a flat tax would have cost them. And even though they didn't make 40% of the wealth, they paid almost 40% of the taxes.
So it's basically marginal taxation with two margins only. Still seems fairly regressive.
your average high school student knows more about science and technology than half of Congress
Come on, our high schools can't be that bad.
This is a classic case of the tragedy of the commons, and is precisely the reason why taxes are mandatory. Unless, of course, if you are rich, in which case you get to do Hollywood accounting to avoid paying your fair share and pretend it's okay because "no one else pays more than they have to either" - never mind that no one else can afford to pay.
Money is power, and with great power comes great responsibility, while little power only brings little responsibility. Not paying more than you have to when you're already struggling to make ends meet is not a sign of great villainy, while hiding your assets when you're already living on the lap of luxury, and thus pushing even more of the burden to those struggling, is. Trying to pretend these are in any way similar requires a level of self-deception that pushes the bounds of credibility way beyond the breaking point.
Basically, if you have power, you have to choose whether you use it for the common good or for selfish gain, whether you are a hero or a villain; if you choose the latter, and are hated and reviled for that, you only have yourself to blame.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
When I report my income, do I really report all my income or is much of the real income available to me hidden in deferrals, tax free municipals, etc? I'm not rich, but I can assure you even my reported income is very different from the real income with the difference mostly in the ability to defer income on investments (iBonds, IRA, 401K, etc.)
Every businessman I know writes off things which personally benefit him be it the yacht (qualifies as a second home), the vacation place, the golf club, the charity deduction (designed to provide positive exposure for his business), the gas for his truck, the company car he commutes in, etc.
The poor have no such investments or write-offs. So their reported matches the real.
I filed my taxes the other day, I was shocked at the low % amount of tax relative to even reported income.
So I question the stats of tax paid versus income percentages because if one of those figures isn't the same (real) for all the strata being compared, you get a very false picture.
As I make more, I find that less and less of it counts as income when I do my taxes.
So... where's the analysis showing the list of ultimate beneficiaries that are being exposed? And specifically which ones are people in office?
Every time the Greek government was given a list by the IMF head LaGrande, it would go missing within the day, never to be found.
Same thing here.
Guillotines are cheaper, and far more effective, as is automatic unclaimed asset forfeiture.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Farmers should not be subsidised and neither should anybody else, then all relationships become mutually beneficial, then it's symbiosis, not parasitism. If a farmer gains from trading with a shoemaker then it's not a parasitic relationship. In a complex enough society a farmer trades with everybody by trading with only a few people, as long as there are no gov't perversions, then all of these relationships, direct or not are symbiotic.
Sometimes and in some places there's nobody apart from a government with the capital to set up electricity generation,
- friend, gov't doesn't have any capital. Gov't does not have capital, is this something difficult to understand?
Gov't does not have capital. In order to have capital you have to be productive, this means you have to produce something. What does gov't produce to be productive and to have capital? What does it produce except violence?
Sure, you can say that a gov't is productive by producing violence, but that's not a symbiotic relationship, that's a parasitic relationship, after all, a virus or a bacteria can kill its host given enough time, so virus or bacteria is parasitic, it's violent.
Some bacteria are useful as long as it does not dictate its rules to the host, but what we have now is a bacteria that might have been useful at some point and now it took over and it's destroying the host.
Your argument that some gov't can be useful, yes, some gov't can be useful. However not in a business sense, some gov't that protects individual freedoms is useful. A gov't that prevents oppression brought by another gov't for example (like a foreign invasions across nation borders) is useful.
No gov't can produce any wealth, but it can be used for protection against tyranny, that can be a legitimate role and THAT can be tolerated and worth paying for, true.
However that's not what gov'ts are. I lived in so many places, it'd be painful for my wrists to type them up, I only saw a semi-useful gov't once, and it's what is considered one of the least intrusive gov'ts out there, and even that one decided to start destroying the host, the economy by doing some pretty stupid shit and for some reason the people haven't forced it to turn back on that stupid decision just yet (but I think this will happen in the next year or so).
Capital is needed to build infrastructure that is actually profitable to run because it makes sense for it to exist from the POV of society, gov'ts do not do it this way, they are not actually supposed to. The entire idea that gov'ts are based on is completely contrary to being efficient, to investing, all that. Gov't is there to spend to do a certain thing, the less it does the better for the host economy.
You can't handle the truth.
Yes, gov't can steal funds from people and misappropriate them and rather than engaging in a function that it should (protection against military occupation, working to protect individual rights, maintaining contract law) instead gov't can do what you are talking about - spending on gov't projects.
None of that should happen. Gov't doesn't have any capital, it gets revenue from capitalists, from people who own and operate private property for their own profit.
You are saying: private capitalists do not have enough capital to run huge projects. I say: nonsense.
There are millions, billions, even hundreds of billions of dollars in capital that exists in the private sector. If it is a profitable venture then it will be invested into. What you are suggesting is that gov't should just take the money and spend it on unprofitable ventures (and they are either unprofitable by definition, because nobody is investing their own money, OR there is a huge political game, which prevents private money from being used to build infrastructure, just like is the case with the Keystone pipeline in Canada and USA).
The problem is that you believe that gov't should be doing any of these things in principle and I am completely convinced that you are totally wrong.
You can't handle the truth.