Call us on
15108257563

The Super Rich’s Offshore Tax Avoidance Strategies

  Sanjiv Gupta CPA  Published 
The Super Rich’s Offshore Tax Avoidance Strategies

Most of the business tycoons use the trusts or holding companies in a different country to represent a majority of their income, thereby showing very low taxable income in their native countries. This is a strategy that is being employed by quite a few very rich people and the governments of the native and the offshore countries are devising measures to stop this practice completely.

Most of the billionaires are using these offshore holding companies and trusts to manage their assets which are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, hold these assets till any further notice and obscure them if needed. A survey was conducted in 2011 by Tax Justice Network, a UK based organization that fights for transparency in the tax rules and payments. The results of this survey were quite alarming. It was found out that the amount which all the rich people had stacked in their offshore companies were running into $32 trillions.

The purpose of these offshore trusts or holding companies is to protect the incomes from the higher tax brackets of the native governments and also to keep a check on the government’s seizure policies.  Bloomberg had analyzed and proved that around 30% of the world’s richest 200 people had assets outside their native countries and these were managed and controlled by the holding companies abroad in an indirect way.

The world saw one of the worst financial crises in the year 2008 and that changed the way the tax system in the US operated. Most of the countries re-visited their tax laws and imposed quick and reasonable changes in them so that the taxpayer could not easily manipulate the loopholes of the rule and evade payment of tax.  In the year 2009, Liechtenstein brought out a law that instructed all the financial institutions to release all the details of their accounts across countries, whenever requested.

Andorra and Switzerland also got influenced by Liechtenstein and hence they also offered concessions to institutions who give a detailed report of all their customer’s accounts held worldwide in all the branches.  With effect from July 1st, Singapore would also join the race to discourage money hoarding in other countries, by making it a criminal offense. Luxembourg is aiming to gradually bring down these kinds of accounts by the year 2015.

Cyprus was the most preferred by most of the Russians to set up offshore holding companies and stack cash in. However, when Cyprus was bogged down in a serious financial crisis in March, the European Union bailed them out upon a condition. The condition was that Cyprus had to introduce a tax on all deposits into its bank that crosses more than 100,000 pounds. This tax component discouraged many wealthy individuals and hence Cyprus saw a huge reduction of deposits to the tune of $2.4 billion in that particular month.

These kinds of changes succeed in reducing offshore money hoarding activities to a small extent, however as more and more countries participate in this drive; this tax evasion process can be completely abolished.