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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Most of the strategies outlined in TFS are illegal, so your point is moot. Plus there are plenty of people like me who pay ~$30,000 in federal taxes (on top of other state and local taxes), but could never afford the legal and accounting team necessary to create such elaborate tax-evasion schemes. In short, it's yet again the middle class that gets fucked.
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.
Intelligent people go to great lengths to avoid having to pay more tax than they are legally obliged to. But if you're poor you don't pay much tax at all, so what the hell are you complaining about? You're using the same roads, bridges, schools and hospitals. All for a few hundred bucks a year.
I guess what you don't understand, Dunbal, is the difference between legal/illegal and right/wrong.
Shakespeare had a solution for that.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
www.MtGOX.com
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.
He also seems to think there is a dichotomy between "Intelligent" and "poor"...
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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.
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.)
It's almost as if there's an enormous amount of the population between the super rich and the poor. It might even be an important group. Maybe the middle class or something?
I hear they're working on that problem, and it should be taken care of in the next few years.
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
You're using the same roads, bridges, schools and hospitals.
No, I'm not:
- A lot of the very rich people don't use roads and bridges very much. For example, Paul Krugman relates driving in for a meeting in New York with some banker types, and making small talk commented on how bad the traffic was. The bankers were confused, because they'd gotten to the meeting by helicopter. If they do use the road, it's a good guess that they have a chauffeur doing the driving.
- They absolutely don't use the public school system. Their kids are likely to attend exclusive and expensive boarding schools.
- They may be in the same hospital building, but they get very different treatment from what you or I get. That's because your average Joe is as valuable to a hospital as his insurance policy, but a rich guy is worth far more.
I am officially gone from
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.
People who took risks generally prefer to be rewarded when those risks pay off.
And if they are a bank circa 2008, they prefer to push the losses on the taxpayer when the risks don't pay off.
If you pay over $30K in federal taxes a year, the current ruling party says you are "rich" and not paying your "fair share".
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Explain to me how hiding your money in offshore accounts so it can't be seen by the govt, for the express purpose of dodging the legally required taxation of that money, is legal?
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.
I'll have you know I'm poor, and quite Intelligent. Whats dichotomy mean??
Do their employees also take a helicopter to work? Do businessmen have to train their employees from scratch in basic reading, writing, and arithmetic skills? Does each company have to have its own set of on-staff doctors to avoid having the entire company out sick with the Plague?
Even if the owners don't personally use the services, they benefit immensely from having them available to the general public, who ultimately become their employees and customers.
TCP: Why the Internet is full of SYN.
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.
How does paying ~30,000 in federal taxes put you in the middle class? According to the calculator I found online, a married couple with no kids would have to make $168,000 a year to pay $30,000 in federal taxes. Lets assume you're single and have zero deductions...you'd still have to make $132000 a year to reach $30k in federal taxes. You sir are not middle class. http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505123_162-41141728/are-you-middle-class/