World News

22058 readers

55 users here now

Breaking news from around the world.

News that is American but has an international facet may also be posted here.

Guidelines for submissions:

Where possible, post the original source of information.
- If there is a paywall, you can use alternative sources or provide an archive.today, 12ft.io, etc. link in the body.
Do not editorialize titles. Preserve the original title when possible; edits for clarity are fine.
Do not post ragebait or shock stories. These will be removed.
Do not post tabloid or blogspam stories. These will be removed.
Social media should be a source of last resort.

These guidelines will be enforced on a know-it-when-I-see-it basis.

For US News, see the US News community.

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

289

Germany approves global minimum corporate tax (www.reuters.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

15 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Multinational firms will have to pay a minimum of 15% tax on all of the profits they make worldwide, regardless of where the profits are generated.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

No problem! :)

I think there genuinely is an issue where large businesses just aren't checked as thoroughly as small ones. It's much easier to check every invoice over X when there's only a few thousand invoices, compared to when there's millions or even hundreds of millions of invoices. There's also the fact that the value of X varies based on the size of the business. I had a few really tiny clients where X was 10, because for the size of the business and the revenue they did, 10 was significant. There were others where X was 1000. Obviously at both of those thresholds, a gold toilet is going to stick out - and for the tiny business, would probably also trigger a money laundering/fraud report (no accountant-client confidentiality when financial crimes are being committed. This is another area where the big firms are given a lot of leeway that small ones are not).

So I can definitely see how for a megacorporation, the auditor may well conclude that no invoice for less than 1,000,000 is worth the effort of looking at, and it becomes quite easy to start sneaking through those gold toilets on <1,000,000 invoices if you know the auditor isn't going to look at them.

As much as I have my doubts about AI, I think accountancy and audit is one of those professions where it could be a useful tool. If an AI could run through all the invoices and just flag the ones that look weird, regardless of value, for a human to take a closer look at, it would make a measurable difference - assuming a sufficiently unbiased and correctly trained AI, of course!