The exec would not be obliged to choose option 1. With the US being such a litigious society he would have to balance the decision to choose the cheap option against the potential costs that would be incurred should an incident occur due to not opting for the safe and thorough option resulting in large damages and fines being awarded against the company. The exec would then have to justify his decision to the shareholders.

The exec is in a position to make such a choice. And he may well be able to justify it to his shareholders without them calling for his neck - especially if the difference in costs isn't too big. But he also knows they may not be sympathetic in any way.

Has society crashed to such depths that it is now utterly reliant upon the legal system and its sophist priesthood to arbitrate good?

We're talking RIGHT and WRONG here. If I scheme against you at work and get you the sack, or sleep with your wife or girlfriend and give her the clap, or mickey on your toilet seat, or cough over you whilst thick with flu, or yap on my phone two seats behind you at the cinema, or steal your car parking spot etc. etc. - do you just cheerfully carry on because, after all, I've not broken any laws?

Can you provide some authority for this legal obligation to maximise profits?

I want to read up on this.

Google "Dodge v. Ford Motor Company" or "eBay v. Newmark".

"A business corporation is organized and carried on primarily for the profit of the stockholders. The powers of the directors are to be employed for that end. The discretion of directors is to be exercised in the choice of means to attain that end, and does not extend to a change in the end itself, to the reduction of profits, or to the nondistribution of profits among stockholders in order to devote them to other purposes."

Well yes, actually.

What would you expect me to do in your examples, beat you to a pulp ?

Well, I don't know. In the case of the foremost and I was your best friend, say, I expect you might.

But the punishment is irrelevant. The legal system is based on fundamental human precepts of justice - right and wrong - and not the other way around. And tax-dodging by the rich (irrespective of some high-priced accountant's actions few have access to) is wrong.

I think the relevant point is the one that someone mentioned yesterday, there are people who work at Google and other such company's who are well paid and who's job it is to minimise the company tax position within the legal boundaries, no-one wants to pay too much tax and no-one should have to but those people wouldn't haver a job if they didn't take advantage of all of the legal allowances and tactics that a company is allowed to use, the fact that Google, Starbucks and the rest are doing nothing illegal has uncovered something that we perhaps don't want to acknowledge - they do this with the connivance of our government and its only journalism that brings it to our attention.

How much is "too much"? The question is irrelevant in Starbucks' case as they haven't paid a penny. Sans legal and financial services almost no-one else has access to, would Google be paying "too much" tax? Certainly from its perspective as any tax is too much to a corporation.



That depends on who's deciding.



Why give mainstream journalists a free pass because they've published a story they've known about for decades? The media is often described as being close to the corporate domain. This is a misconception. They are part of it. Very often they are owned by the same people who are rorting us up every orifice. And it was government (somewhat surprisingly) that opened the doors to this issue. Journalists working for a newspaper taking half a million pounds of sponsorship from Google are loathe to write something negative about them.

Too much is more than you are required to - its that simple.

Or rather its not that simple, when I ran my own business I admit to being accounts illiterate, I can understand a profit and loss sheet (I'm not totally illiterate) but the balance sheet side of things just wafted a couple of yards above my head, so I employed an accountant who promised me that his fees would be saved each year in the amount of tax he could save me, and in that way that all small business operators do, I left it to him and I still assume that he did save me some tax by filling in my forms once a year, he certainly saved me a huge pain in the bum by doing it.






And yet they are ?

There's an awful lot of squirming around going on from various desks, all of this stuff is ignored during the good times but its only when the poo hits the fan that departments start to look around for someone else to blame other than themselves and fingers get pointed like in a school playground. Just out of interest one of our clients is currently working on a major new development for Google in Ireland where I assume their major European base is on the strength of the old "celtic tiger" low corporation tax economy, I don't suppose that the Irish government are regretting inviting them into their country on a promise of low tax and the facility to shift assets around within the EU boundaries when the return is employment and development - maybe, just maybe our government works from the same model ?