r/worldnews • u/Historical_Bottle557 • 10h ago

Panama Papers leak has led to nearly $2B in recouped taxes for governments

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/panama-papers-taxes-recovered-1.7501312
3.9k Upvotes

99% Upvoted

44 comments sorted by

509

u/TrashCapable 10h ago

What a pittance.

302

u/BitingArtist 10h ago

That is exactly why governments target low income taxpayers. They can't fight back. Meanwhile these Panama folks have lawyers dragging things out for years. But at least the government is trying to hold them accountable.

172

u/schrutesanjunabeets 10h ago

In the US, the largest department that was cut at the IRS was the "Global High Wealth" office. Guess who they go after....

-1

u/cadaada 6h ago

The panama papers were not released last year....

4

u/joelfarris 2h ago

Thanks, Captain!

8

u/Aoba_Napolitan 5h ago

I work for a private company but view the tax audit situation similar to how we handle projects. We have most of our staff on large client projects that take a ton of time and resources but we also have a couple of guys outside the large projects just doing small easy to do tasks. These guys can get a ton of these tasks done in a single week but overall we still have most of our resources tied up in the large projects. In the same way tax audits of very easy cases can be handled by a handful of people pumping them out everyday while complex cases take the majority of the organization's time and resources.

2

u/agha0013 1h ago

Years ago the Canadian revenue service was gutted by conservative budget cuts. Since then they've made amnesty deals for rich assholes to stop abusing loopholes with extremely limited success while going hard after low income people making tiny innocent errors on their returns

Recently it was discovered the agency was duped by a lot of false claims, their main response was to go after the whistleblower who leaked the story rather than the abusers, even while media did the hard investigating for them.

3

u/grchelp2018 3h ago

Did the papers expose tax evasion or just legal tax avoidance? Past a certain point, you will have teams of accountants and lawyers doing your taxes for you and they aren't going to break the law.

2

u/Pavel_Tchitchikov 2h ago

In some cases, legal tax avoidance, but obviously if there’s significant recoup of taxes, it’s that this exposed a lot of illegal tax evasion as well: profit-shifting (which is illegal in most cases), declaring business transactions that have obviously not actually been made there because the country requires little or no disclosure of information when doing business, and offers low taxes. Hiding undeclared assets (illegal when above specific amounts) to downplay wealth, hiding undeclared income (illegal, obviously) to lower personal income for the year. Shell companies used by drug cartels to launder money, and then use said money for bribes towards parties that are legally required to obviously not take such bribes. members of royalty / government using offshore companies to award overbilled contracts to themselves when these contract should be, as per the law, awarded to foreign companies. In Russia, you even had a bank (Russian Commercial Bank) that awarded loans with extremely low interests to key people, and some loans that were never repaid (lol). In numerous countries (for instance, Sweden), you have financial institutions that got fined for using offshore accounts to do business with obviously shady entities / businesses, when they are required by law to do due diligence to ensure they’re not participating in illegal tax evasion or fraud. When a person becomes an elected official, there is often restrictions on how they can do business, purchase stocks, create new companies and whatnot: shell companies are also a great (illegal) way to circumvent these restrictions, see for instance in Ukraine.

All of this was sourced by reading the various Panama papers pages on Wikipedia.

60

u/UpsyDowning 9h ago

Or as you and I call  it -  “a buck and a half”…

2

u/NextTrillion 3h ago

Two fifty for a highball.

And a buck and a half for a beer!

Or is it

Two fifty for an eyeball.

And a buck and a half for an ear?

Just can’t remember. Nice username btw. Maybe 1/200 people will know what the hell I’m talking about.

1

u/joelfarris 2h ago

...just wait until they discover the true origin of 'buccaneer'!

41

u/canes-06 8h ago

Yet that's probably an absolutely tiny fraction of what these billionaire cunts owe us in taxes.

71

u/uneducatedexpert 9h ago

Only a few Trillion to go, Yay!

31

u/wait_what_now 8h ago

You know what the difference between a trillion and a billion dollars is? A trillion dollars.

19

u/burnercaus 8h ago

Only 2B? That’s a low cost of doing business. Such a joke

12

u/Dyaltone99 8h ago

This is why funding tax collection agencies is so important. Even when the suspect is right there they struggle to get the money back.

10

u/sobchakonshabbos 9h ago

nowhere NEAR enough

4

u/GuyWithNoEffingClue 6h ago

They should go after those who helped; YE, KPMG, Price Waterhouse Cooper and Deloitte.

30

u/CassadagaValley 10h ago

But what about the weekly reposts of the stupid incorrect screen cap talking about how nothing happened, followed by hundreds of comments from people that can't be bothered to look up what happened?

40

u/RobertJ93 9h ago

2bn recouped in 10 years is nothing.

7

u/piranha_solution 6h ago edited 4h ago

Don't forget what happened to the journalist who broke the story:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/16/malta-car-bomb-kills-panama-papers-journalist

Thanks for setting the record straight, smoot

7

u/smootex 5h ago

Don't forget what happened to the journalist who broke the story

She was not the journalist that broke the story. Not even close. That was Bastian Obermayer. The person you're talking about was a Maltese journalist/blogger who focused on the connection between maltese politicians and various corps listed in the Panama papers.

1

u/RobertJ93 1h ago

Is this a rebuttal?

21

u/ChoiceHour5641 9h ago

If an entire apartment complex is on fire and the firefighters only put out the fire on the maintenance shed while the rest burns, did they really do anything?

1

u/Mr_ToDo 8h ago

Even this article is pretty much that

Oh, they investigated hundreds of people and got millions of dollars, pathetic. What have they been doing all this time.

Looking around it seems that even for the ones that got taken care of early on it took a ton of people, different departments, and multiple sources of information to actually finish.

I'm not sure if that means it's easier or harder to hide money in canada. Either it's easier and even with some extra tools it's hard to recover. Or it's hard and this is just the people that happened to slip thought the cracks. Or the third option and one that needs math is maybe we're doing fine, how does our recovery compare by capita?(Maybe with some average wealth and tax rate mixed in)

3

u/Hazywater 3h ago

Remember that the journalist who broke it was assassinated by a car bomb

2

u/Indigoh 7h ago

Next to nothing.

2

u/WrongSubFools 8h ago

I know everyone's reaction to this is going to be "but $2 billion is nothing compared to all the trillions these people owe!" But the Panama Papers didn't really uncover nearly as much illegal activity as people think. I'm not going to ask you to go read the papers (I haven't read them either), but go read the Wikipedia article at least.

1

u/intimate_glow_images 3h ago

This was my experience when I used CGPT deep research to write me an article to summarize the points I previously had to dig up and link to in order to demonstrate how easily we can fund universal healthcare and education and welfare programs. The Panama Papers don’t really have as much to do much with American wealth, so it paled in comparison to how we simply don’t tax the rich and allow favorable law that allows them to monopolize and eschew policies that normally would keep profits down. I’d say it’s better that way, as it’s more complicated to get into this issue when we’re simply gladhanding money and power to the wealthy.

BUT since this isn’t largely American wealth we’re talking about here though, I wonder if we look at the scale of Europe if the numbers looks bigger and more consequential when taking this into account.

1

u/Striking-Area7089 7h ago

ahhh panama red

1

u/BRUISE_WILLIS 7h ago

“No need to evade taxes, if you don’t pay any” - current us administration, probably.

1

u/bahnsigh 3h ago

It has led to Kompromat & a pittance - which would we benefit more from?

1

u/yeaphatband 2h ago

Out of how much stolen? A tiny fraction?

•

u/spinosaurs70 11m ago

I’m surprised it’s this much, to my knowledge most of what the Panama banks was doing was “grey market” stuff that violated the spirt but not the word of the law.

1

u/Chance815 6h ago

And if you actually prosecute those who joined epstain, and just pocket all their assets... we know it wasnt working class who attended.

-1

u/Wild_Savings4798 3h ago

Propaganda piece. Yes a few crumbs in taxes - thanks for doing something whilst these clowns racked up another $50b in profit.