Comment by immibis
Comment by immibis 3 days ago
How many computer programmers moonlight as tax avoidance accountants?
Comment by immibis 3 days ago
How many computer programmers moonlight as tax avoidance accountants?
Yeah, that is tax minimization, not tax avoidance. There's a big difference.
According to this article, it’s actually evasion when Apple does it!
Isn't it tax avoidance (legal) vs tax evasion (illegal)?
How? There's a big difference between avoidance and evasion, but avoidance and minimization mean pretty much the same thing in this context.
If there are any novel or situation-specific conclusions drawn, that sounds like an easy sell to CPAs and independent tax preparers. Maybe even individual tax optimizers.
My naive assumption is that sophisticated analysis will return the same few well-known recommendations almost all the time -- the taxation variant of eating properly, sleeping regularly, and getting appropriate exercise.
Certainly for anything I actually do, I've not found anything that is better than something like TurboTax gives me.
The scope of what I'm working on is trying to build strategies for holding and selling stock as well in order to minimize taxes. I've only ever used it on paper trades.
How many people pursue business or accounting degrees instead of mechanical engineering or biotechnology degrees? The talent flows to what policy incentivizes, over the long run.
Your point, that people can't just switch careers willy nilly, actually reinforces the point of the article -- that incentivizing accounting games actually reduces time spent on impactful pursuits in the long run.
More like how many people with degrees in Business go into Management Consulting, would like to join a startup as a Product Manager, or accountants that want to be Associates at a VC firm rather than work a big 4.
But even for programmers, plenty of people make the decision to go into programming or medicine or law because they are well paid and respected careers. And interests in secondary school and university are influenced by parents, teachers and the culture promoting certain directions. Kids these days are bombarded by STEM everything.
Tons of people who get degrees in technical fields work outside that field. There are many people who have have spent at least part of their studies or career in hard science, SWE, IT, management consulting, law or finance before switching to something else in that list to improve their work/life balance, to make more money, to find employment more easily, or simply because learning the field and cracking its puzzles is engaging work for them no matter the exact technical field it's in.
High finance and crypto are two places where a high concentration of technical skills intersect with using those same skills to game our financial and legal systems.
If there were no need for tax avoidance accountants, they very well might have chosen to study to become software engineers instead. It's not like they were born a tax avoidance accountant and would be sitting in the field rotting if they couldn't find work avoiding taxes. Many would at least be regular accountants (efficiently allocating money is still more useful to all of us than efficiently avoiding taxes), or maybe some other sort of lawyer (your city's prosecutors AND your city's public defenders are both sorely overworked).
Tax avoidance is a legal problem instead of a tech problem, but it has many parallels wherever there are bad incentives. These are fundamentally not pro-social activities, but trying to get an unfair advantage through loopholes.
More computer programmers might moonlight as SEO gurus, if search engines didn't put up at least a token amount of resistance against scummy low-effort SEO tactics.
Fewer tax avoidance accountants would still be tax avoidance accountants, if we made a bigger effort to prevent it. (And that doesn't mean accountants would have to be programmers instead, there are many other kinds of talent)
Tangential, but a pet project I've been working on has been doing exactly that! Looking at US federal tax laws and using constraints solves to find optimal paths to the lowest taxes.
I don't really do anything besides play with it, my taxes are very simple and boring, but it's been a fun project to play around with.