How to cheat on your taxes

The rich are different from you and me.

Some things are hard to understand because they’re complicated, but when it comes to finance — and finance crimes — we enter the realm of things that are complicated so they’ll be hard to understand.

The Propublica Secret IRS Files leaks reveal the wealthy pay infinitesimal amounts of tax and the ultra-rich often pay no tax at all.

Propublica is careful to note that all of this is legal — that it’s how the system is supposed to work.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/15/guillotines-and-taxes/#carried-interest

But that’s not the whole story. A string of leaks from high-powered tax-evasion specialists have revealed that the richest people of every nation, up to prime ministers and “national treasures” avail themselves of fraudulent accounting to duck tax.

From the Paradise Papers to the Panama Papers to Luxleaks to Swissleaks and beyond, we have a wealth of evidence that many of the “legal” deductions the super-rich deploy are actually grounded in accounting frauds.

Even when there’s no fraud, some tactics are in such bad faith, reliant on such absurd readings of the law that they’re outlawed once they’re discovered. This comes in up Disney heiress Abigail Disney’s frank account of…