The paying tax and 100% legal is only tested when brought to court, which seems that be chronically underfunded conveniently and I laugh loudly at the belief that 100% of all corporations are in legal compliance.
You said that the rich are entitled to the freedoms as anyone else but shrugs off that only the rich have the effective means to make use of these instruments. They are quite capable of being completely invisible to public scrutiny by holding all their assets as an individual.
They choose to take steps to leverage opaque often intentionally complicated corporate layering schemes to minimize risk, skirt (legally or not) tax, or to layer the sources of bad money.
Whatever the reason for engaging in these games, I believe they are no longer "living life like every citizen deserves privacy" (note your comment spoke of total privacy from oversight which no citizen pretty much anywhere actually has).
I'm at least happy that my home of Canada is starting to chip away the corporate veil.
Everyone who owns shares in a retirement fund benefits from the privacy afforded by these instruments. If every beneficial owner of every corporation had to be publicly registered, that'd be an enormous proportion of the regular public!
Think about what it would mean that anyone could, at any time, look up all the investing choices of anyone in the country.
It would be truly fascinating information but yes in our current level of innovation and maturity, totally bonkers.
It's totally a thing to have trades pegged to US politicians' investment choices, because they often have the knowledge not available to the public to make "better" (financially) decisions.
As per your first comment, this is generally the difference between an active and passive investor which usually works out to someone who owns about 10% of any given company. It's probably a little too high as it isn't hard to imagine a cabal of 11 wealthy tax dodgers playing games with the reporting requirements.
I believe most laws getting enacted which are addressing corporate secrecy are primarily targetting the active owners of companies and usually unnamed beneficiaries who have a benefit to the company/trust who aren't specifically owners, who can reap the benefits of the company's assets without strictly their name of the deed so to speak.
Again, most of this revolves around what is asked by government officials for auditing and less about what information is being dumped into public information.
Your home in Canada just recently demanded blind trusts all report their members personal information to the government. Far from engaging only the rich, that demand hit millions of every day citizens with shared bank accounts with their parents or kids. Those are setup for a variety of reasons, one of which is to circumvent probate tax! Yep, by everyday non-rich people!
However, note that the CRAs information collection did not make your personal bank account information public. Would you prefer that it had? I used the example of a blind trust here because "non-blind" trusts are one of the common uses of non-commercial corporate entities.
Also, I never once said "total privacy from oversight", all these corporate entities already supply financial and ownership information to the government, whose job it is to hold them to account. This is not the same and making information public so a rabid mob of people can enact vigilante justice, or whatever people like you hope comes out of it.
>Your home in Canada just recently demanded blind trusts all report their members personal information to the government. Far from engaging only the rich, that demand hit millions of every day citizens with shared bank accounts with their parents or kids. Those are setup for a variety of reasons, one of which is to circumvent probate tax! Yep, by everyday non-rich people!
How does this hurt anyone though? That is not clear at all. The thing you're upset about here is that blind trust members information is reported to the government, but with no clear statement how this hurts anyone, wealthy or not.
Chances are, the information turned over the government has anyway.
If this is a legal mechanism to circumvent probate taxes, then its not a problem. If not, well, even regular people should pay their taxes, no?
Taxes aren't an ethical or moral topic, they are a legal topic. If you can avoid a tax through some legal structure, you are within your rights to do so and you can't judge this as some sort of shady business. Taxes are mostly used to create incentives and collect money, if people are allowed a legal structure to avoid a probate tax, then that might be an incentive on purpose. Just because you did something to pay less taxes does not mean that you are some bad actor exploiting a loophole.
For example, taxes are only paid on profit, so companies are incentivized to spend their money and pay less in taxes. No one sees this as a legal loophole that needs to be fixed, it is very much intentional.
Also you are making the false dichotomy here of "regular people" as something different from "somewhat versed in financial entities people". That's weird.
they already collect enough information that if the goal was to seize wealth they could easily do so, even before this change. I don’t see how this change makes that more imminent.
If someone wants to argue you shouldn’t have to register things with the government I’m all ears but it is no way comparable to what the Nazis did.
Say a couple lives in a house. They have a son, who lives with them.
The wife passes away.
1. Should her husband pay tax on her share of the house when it passes to him? Assuming these are not wealthy people, this may force the sale of the house.
2. Should the house go through probate? Should everyone move out while that happens?
The old man wants to leave the house to his son.
3. Should the son pay tax on the house when his father passes away?
4. Should he move out while the house goes through probate?
It is because of cases like these that we have ways to avoid going through probate.
A tangent, but this is in and of itself completely nuts. One should be able to read the text of the law, as written, and understand what you are and are not permitted to do - end of story. There should be no need to look at precedents. Courts only recourse if a law is unclear should be to send it back to an elected legislature for refinement.
You said that the rich are entitled to the freedoms as anyone else but shrugs off that only the rich have the effective means to make use of these instruments. They are quite capable of being completely invisible to public scrutiny by holding all their assets as an individual.
They choose to take steps to leverage opaque often intentionally complicated corporate layering schemes to minimize risk, skirt (legally or not) tax, or to layer the sources of bad money.
Whatever the reason for engaging in these games, I believe they are no longer "living life like every citizen deserves privacy" (note your comment spoke of total privacy from oversight which no citizen pretty much anywhere actually has).
I'm at least happy that my home of Canada is starting to chip away the corporate veil.