Comment by AnthonyMouse

> Did you know UK tax law makes every scheme whose primary purpose is tax avoidance tax evasion?

This is the kind of law politicians pass thinking they're being clever when they're really just being incoherent.

If the government makes renewable energy a tax deduction and then you invest in renewable energy to get the tax deduction, that's tax avoidance. The primary purpose of making the investment is to reduce your tax burden and if it wasn't a deduction (i.e. it didn't allow you to avoid taxes) then you'd have bought the power from the power company instead. But causing you to change your behavior in order to avoid taxes is the purpose behind making that a tax deduction.

If you're deciding where to put your facility and the decision comes down to which jurisdiction has a lower tax rate, that's tax avoidance. You're avoiding taxes in the higher tax jurisdiction by putting your operations in the lower tax jurisdiction. But that is likewise the intended purpose of the lower tax rate. That jurisdiction wants businesses to set up there, or wants local businesses to have more money so they build more facilities and hire more local people etc.

If the government raises the tax on cigarettes and that causes you to quit smoking... you get the idea.

It makes no sense for it to be illegal for you to do the thing the government intentionally passed law to give you the incentive to do. But more than that, how are they supposed to prove it? They claim you quit smoking to avoid the tax, you claim it was because you didn't want to get cancer.

Hypothetically they could uncover some email in which you were complaining about the high taxes before you quit, but that doesn't actually prove anything -- the tax could make you chafe even if your primary purpose was to avoid cancer. Moreover, the well-counseled entity is not going to write that email, which makes it a law against writing something down rather than a law against doing something, and those are the worst because the evil megacorps who know they're doing something shady make sure to cross all their t's and the ones who get punished are the guileless ones who didn't know there was effectively a law against complaining about taxes.