A tax haven is a nation with low to no taxes, where foreigners can operate for tax purposes.
The term you are looking for, and almost had, was "tax avoidance".
Tax avoidance is perfectly legal. It is tax evasion that is illegal.
Investing your Roth IRA in a company your the CEO of like Peter Thiel did is illegal, making this tax evasion.
As to why it’s illegal, selling an arbitrary number of shares in your private company to yourself for 1$ then buying it back from yourself at say 1 billion dollars is normally legal. So, without such limits everyone could move unlimited money into a Roth IRA.
The penalty being low doesn’t prevent this from being fraudulent. Second, the transaction doesn’t need to be unwound for the funds not to be in the Roth IRA.
The timing of his “investment” is also off, he put the funds in after a seed round. Therefore those shares where worth far more than the annual Roth IRA contribution limit.
To you the words “illegal” “tax evasion” and “fraudulent” all may be synonyms, to me they are not. The consequences are the only thing I care about, and there is no authority that could view those words as synonyms. The IRS nor any other part of the executive branch could view it as tax evasion or fraud, the courts could not either, and Congress made this product out of their own desperation. As Congress is still desperate for short term revenues its unlikely they would alter the Roth product.
You can sell shares at arbitrary discounts especially when there are not liquid markets. If stock options are more necessary to circumvent accounting then in the money options can be used as well, with the Roth purchasing the stock options instead of earning it and getting more money in future years to purchase the in the money stock.
If the government wanted an unlimited Roth IRA cap they wouldn’t have added a Roth IRA cap. The fact they added a cap shows clear intent, which is definitely how the courts view such forms of Tax Evasion.
Now the government doesn’t go after the vast majority of criminals be that the IRS, FBI, or your local cops. However, that has no impact on what is or isn’t breaking the law as written. As such this was clearly tax evasion because it’s illegally reducing taxes he would owe and it’s fraudulent activity because it’s falsifying financial records for personal benefit. Hell was likely also wire fraud depending on how he submitted tax documents, not that such charges are normally tacked on to such cases but they still apply.
> He complied with the contribution cap and the income cap that year.
Not if he used am old pre round validation after the investment occurred at a higher valuation as has been reported.
Also your penalties where off: However, if the individual for whom the IRA was established or the IRA’s beneficiary engages in a PT with respect to the IRA, the sanction is the loss of the tax-exempt status of the IRA as of the first day of the taxable year in which the PT occurs.
As such, all transactions after the original transaction lack their tax exempt status. As such based on listed rules and including interest and penalties and he’s potentially facing a multi billion dollar tax bill.
You might want a little self-reflection about that last sentence and how it paints you as precisely the sort of person that others are rightfully worried about.
There are more important things than money. Having your name dragged through the mud, having people presume you are a disgusting sexist before they have even met you, these are things that can destroy a person regardless of their wealth.
Comments do not fall on a spectrum between "absolutely sexist" and "absolutely not sexist".
Comments exist as fixed points in space, and the observers fall on a spectrum of "absolutely going to call the comment sexist" and "absolutely going to call the comment not sexist".
The men who are "clamming up" are judging the audience of their comments and deciding that the potential costs of honesty are just too high compared to the benefits.
They know that they will no longer get the benefit of the doubt and that they will be convicted without trial. If the punishment for traffic infringements was death and you were immediately judged, convicted and executed by the police officer on the scene, there will be a large number of people who would simply stop driving.
The problem being highlighted here isn't bad communicators. The problem is good communicators being incentivized out of communicating.
It says something about you that you could not comprehend something that obvious.
Yes, ethics is agnostic to one's personal convictions when it is your job.
Same as how defense lawyers leave their personal sense of justice out of their jobs.
Same as how sports referees don't let their childhood fandom of a particular team affect their calls.
Same as how actors will be physically intimate with people the opposite of the sexual preference.
Imagine if the person in charge of AI Ethics converted to a fundamentalist Christian sect. Their ethics changed and now they think LGBT people should be discriminated against explicitly. Nobody supporting Margaret Mitchell would be defending this new convert's application of the personal ethics in their job. That proves this is merely a convenient argument on their part, not a principled one.
