GREEKS - PAY NO TAXES

ZEUS WANTS HIS MONEY BACK

SOMEWHAT SLIGHTLY IRRITATED GREEKS CROSS THE INTERNATIONAL BORDERS.

The larger the number of people who evade taxes – the sloppier their advisors become, putting their clients at greater risk.  Errors often cost 200% of the original tax-bill, multiplying the original by three; so it is important to get it completely right.

There are plenty of legal manoeuvres to minimise your tax-bills. All reliable professional tax-planners implicitly or explicitly guarantee their advice and mediation. They clearly identify, in writing, the tax savings they are engineering for you, in exchange for fees, and they guarantee, in writing, the outcome.  All professionals carry Professional Indemnity insurance, which they rely on if you are targeted for and lose a Back-Duty-Case. The advisor pays the taxes and costs; then recovers it from the insurers.  Check your guarantees.

In the USA, advisors can be convicted and imprisoned along with their evasive clients, which is a strong motivation to stay sharp and stay legal.

However – when “everybody does it” many tax-payers take no advice and many fly-by-night advisors give no guarantees and evaporate (to their own tax-havens) at the first sign of trouble. This is what is happening in Greece and to Greeks “safely” embedded in tax-havens.  As public anger erupts and starving citizens use their dwindling resources to buy a guillotine for the village square, even the most brass-necked, habitually cheating Greek bureaucrats are organising raids by their Financial Crimes Police in London, New York and tax-havens to claw-back the annual $28 billion evaded by the posh and powerful. When they examine the sloppy bookkeeping and alleged contracts (e.g. selling a $50 million Greek hotel to a London off-shore company for $0.5 million – or, via a back-to-back, borrowing $50 million from a Greek Bank secured on two old donkeys and a sick goat and transferring the $50 million to New York) then even Greek judges will find them guilty and repatriate all the capital – siphoned out over the past 30 years; which at today’s values totals $840 billion or 23 million jobs.  That will balance the books in Athens.  

TAX AND ECONOMICS ARTICLES 29TH APR 13 

THE TROJAN HORSE? If Greece can claw-back $840 billion – calculate how much the EU, UK, USA, Japan, China etc will repatriate; perhaps most of the $21 trillion currently off-shore.  Check your advisor’s guarantees.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/sep/09/greece-tax-evasion-professional-classes

Primary Greek tax evaders are the professional classes - Greece is riddled with corruption, but a study shows that banks, politicians and professional workers are largely to blame (Guardian 10SEP12).

http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/adair.morse/research/AMTTaxEvasion.pdf

TAX EVASION ACROSS INDUSTRIES: SOFT CREDIT EVIDENCE FROM GREECE

NIKOLAOS ARTAVANIS ADAIR MORSE MARGARITA TSOUTSOURA

Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University University of Chicago, Booth

School of Business and NBER University of Chicago, Booth School of Business June 25, 2012