Uncle Sugar goes international looking for your loot!

[Willy The Londoner]

The same problem with big businesses affect every country. In the UK big companies accounting systems are so complex that very few of them pay a great deal of tax.   The negotiate with the Tax authorities as to how much THEY WANT to pay.  The governments are afraid to lose the income from all the tax that their employees have to pay.  In the UK taxed is deducted before it goes into the pay packet.

Even worse with the online biggies , Ebay paypal, Google etc etc. They have small offices in little countries within the European Union with small tax demands and so they pay no tax in the countries they take billions from.

Even Starbucks with all it outlets in the UK paid hardly any tax there because they make little profit in the UK, they say.  All supplies to individual units are charged at exorbitant rates from an office in some corner of a European low tax haven.  However when this news leaked Starbucks lost a lot of customers but no doubt they have all crept back now.

The problem is that the world over there are very few, if any, poor politicians.

Willy

[JohnB]

Maxx & DavidE,
Transparency is good.
Long time go, in my "Civics" class (yes, there was such a class) the instructor said if you have a problem,
do not complain to your congressman...better to write a letter to the editor.
 
This thread is a can of worms.
As I recall, not all church related income is tax free. There are IRS guidelines for "unrelated business income".
See http://www.irs.gov/Charities-&-Non-Profits/Unrelated-Business-Income-Tax

Many church related charity avenues are of huge benefit to the truly needy. If there is doubt, transparency
standards do exist, one of the most obvious being the BBB.  http://www.bbb.org/us/charity/
So, I would not go so far as to incorporate all church money making machines as tax dodges. In my opinion, the
Salvation Army or the Catholic Relief Services serve no other purpose than to administer help & relief to the needy.

Then again, the so- called "mega- churches", the "televangelists", I ask, "what the f*ck, who are these people?"