
Ask HN: How hard would an offshore tax avoidance as a service be? - Captainbana
If I had the resources, I would have setup a Panama account to avoid (not evade) taxes. Is it possible this can be made into a startup which completely or semi automated the process?
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JacobAldridge
Check out Nomad Capitalist
([http://nomadcapitalist.com](http://nomadcapitalist.com)) and Streber
([https://www.streber.st](https://www.streber.st)) for some good information
on companies doing this.

Two relevant points from my research / understanding: 1) Most jurisdictions
either need or like some degree of physical presence, either a client or their
agent. It's not a simple 100% online solution, especially if a bank account is
required.

2) There's a big difference between multi-nationals who can properly avoid
taxes this way, and individuals and small businesses who get trapped by
Residency (and, for the US and Eritrea, Citizenship) requirements. For someone
in The US, UK, Australia, much of Europe etc, it's not as simple as running
revenue through an offshore company and account to legally avoid tax. Your
country of residency will generally consider that a 'Controlled Foreign
Company' (CFC) and tax you _as if_ it were a local company anyway.

My possible future plans, for example, would require moving my family to
another country before I'd actually benefit from any tax reduction.

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philiphodgen
I do this in my day job -- international tax lawyer.

As the saying goes, "science may one day accomplish this, but it hasn't done
so yet." In theory you can write enough code and SOPs to mirror the laws of
multiple countries.

Unfortunately, laws change.

Further, even if the laws remain static, the facts change. People do the
weirdest thing -- they change their minds, they do new stuff. Your code and
SOPs will have to be adapted.

In theory you can write code and SOPs to handle current law, keep up with
changes in the law, and accommodate human frailties, indecision, and mistakes.

Then in order to make the code and SOPs profitable, you must push enough
customers through the pipeline at a high enough price in order to make a
profit.

It is here that I think you fail in your quest. I happen to know -- from
talking to trustees in the Cook Islands -- the approximate number of asset
protection trusts established every year. It is a number whose small size
surprised me. This tells me the market for international business structures
is small.

The market is especially small after you chase away all of the bullshit
artists who want to do skanky stuff offshore. Those doors are closing all the
time. It's that "the law changes" thing I talked about.

So. Legitimate users of offshore structures. Small number.

Your cost to build a system with software instead of humans. Big number.

The actual tax benefits to companies like those on HN that are larger than a
breadbox and smaller than the Hoover Dam -- not a big economic benefit to the
income statement. (Hint: it involves the time value of money, which means that
you have to be pushing a lot of dollars through the pipes to make the present
value/future value numbers to look like "jackpot!").

Sorry. I'm probably just a crusty old incumbent ripe for disruption.

Or there is another possibility -- humans, even at $1,000/hour, are cheaper
than code.

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tmaly
I think it would be really hard, but if you look at a smaller slice of the
problem, there might be something else you could provide.

What do the lawyers that provide this do? What aspects of what they do are
repetitive and manual? Can you build a service that automates just that and
then sell it to the lawyers?

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lumberjack
A comment pertaining to startup "common sense": You clearly have no domain
knowledge. How do you presume you could even identify whether there was a
market opportunity, let alone contribute anything to any startup you might
found? This is something some law firms in some specific countries might
attempt.

Now regarding your question, your first stop should be a notary that deals in
estate management, particularly somebody who deals with inheritance a lot.
Through their job they come across all kinds of weird tax schemes regularly
and would be up to date on the topic.

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edwcar13
Those accounts have lawyers and financial experts crossing all the t's and
dotting every i. If you were going to automate this then your servers would
need to be hosted somewhere in Panama since they are using Panama law to build
these shell companies.

Then hire a team of Panama lawyers to file the documents and financial experts
to manage the money that is being "hidden".

I believe the only thing you could do to automate the process is build a site
like rocketlawyer.com and have people file it that way and then follow up a
consultation call to walk them through the rest of the process.

