Perhaps many people are somewhat familiar with the worn out phrase nothing is certain except death and taxes. While death is indeed certain – taxes are a different story. 

And this is for three reasons. For one, not everyone pays taxes and not everyone pays the same amount of taxes. 

Different levels of taxation has been popularly expressed by one of the richest men in the world, Warren Buffet when saying that he pays less tax than his cleaner. Here is why:

Mr Buffett undertook an informal survey from 15 out of his 18 office staff at his Berkshire Hathaway empire. The billionaire said he was paying 17.7% payroll and income tax, compared with an average in the office of 32.9%. He said, there wasn’t anyone in the office, from the receptionist up, who paid as low a tax rate as I.

The second reason as to why taxes are different from death is that, after 40 years of neo-liberalism, the idea of progressive taxation is virtually dead. Even the memories of a rather sensible idea like the Tobin Tax have almost been deleted from the public sphere. 

Thirdly, there are people and corporations that pay no tax at all – they shirk from paying taxes. This leads to what is known as tax evasion. 

Tax evasion and tax fraud are illegal acts hence, it is always against the law. It defeats a state’s need for people and companies to pay taxes. Tax evasion is done by individuals, corporations, trusts, and others. It is an act of omission that is pre-planned, organised, deliberate, and secretly carried out. 

For that, corporations use “dishonest” – some might call it “corporate lying” – when it comes to tax reporting. It also involves the corporation declaring less profits than what was actually achieved while overstating deductions and overheads, and worse, using corporate bribes against authorities (read: corporate corruption) and finally, the hiding of money in secret locations. 

However, since states also offer several goodies to the rich and corporations, much of these fraudulent strategies are not always necessary. For example, most states provide so-called tax loopholes which technically allow the rich and corporations to legally avoid paying taxes.

In contrast to “illegal” tax evasion, “legal” tax avoidance makes it possible for corporations to avoid paying taxes lawfully by using legal tax laws to reduce a corporation’s obligation to pay taxes. 

This is when something euphemistically called creative accounting or, even better, exotic accounting comes in – a form of financial trickery or corporate deception.

Known for their dodgy work, the so-called “Big Four” dubious accounting firms do exactly that. They are: Deloitte, Ernest & Young (EY), KPMG, and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) and not to be forgotten: top tax-evader “HSBC”.

Both tax evasion and tax avoidance can be viewed as forms of tax non-compliance and corporate criminality. Both outline a wide range of corporate-criminality and other activities that are intended to subvert a state’s tax system. 

Both tax evasion and tax avoidance are widespread phenomena and can be practiced by corporations, trusts, and individuals. 

Billionaires and corporations are certainly very active at avoiding and evading the taxman – seen as “an unwarranted business cost” by the corporate apparatchiks. 

Tax evasion is depriving their own state of the funds to repair streets and bridges, sending out the police and the fire brigade, finance public health services, schools, universities, hospitals, and so many more. 

Worse, over the last four decades, neo-liberalism’s globalization (read: imperialism and financial capitalism) has ideologically flanked the opening up of ever more possibilities to circumvent taxes. 

And the available loopholes and offerings to avoid paying taxes are rather ruthlessly exploited by multinational companies, the wealthy, and semi-criminal individuals like, for example, Nicolas Cage, Martha Stewart, Wesley Snipes, and many more. 

With a few exceptions, corporate media that often themselves are tax-avoiding corporations,  have successfully camouflaged the rather dry, complicated, and boring issue of taxation and even more so, of corporate tax evasion.

Together with conservative and neo-liberal political parties, this has made tax evasion an almost acceptable by-product of capitalism. In general, tax evasion is ideologically sold as “an unavoidable part of human nature” – greed is good! 

Alternatively, it is presented as an unavoidable, albeit negative, part of globalization that can’t be avoided. Tax evasion by corporations is presented as “a few bad apples” in a barrel that is otherwise fine. 

Yet, neither tax evasion nor tax avoidance aren’t simply bad apples nor are these semi-criminal activities inevitable. They are neither given to us by God nor do they come to us as part of the laws of physics.

Instead, they are the deliberately planned result of a human-made tax policy that is shaped by the ideology of neo-liberalism advocating less or – preferably – no corporate taxes. All of this is not simply the “failure to make the right policy choices” by governments. Rather, much of this is guided by the ideology of neo-liberalism. 

Worse, many politicians are manipulated by corporate lobbyists. Then there is the fact that politicians and political parties depend on corporate media. More often than not, these are corporations themselves – particularly under corporate capitalism. 

Predictably, such media corporations themselves are also tax-avoiding corporations. Yet, politicians depend on them to get what is known as “airtime”. 

This is pretty much the only way in which political parties make themselves known to potential voters. As an outcome of all this, media corporations are not that likely to assist politicians advocating to put a stop to tax minimization, tax evasion, and increasing taxes on corporations. 

To sum up, such media corporations aren’t interested in supporting the creation of a tax system that hits wealthy corporations – least of all, wealthy “media” corporations. In other words, advocating high corporate taxes will not get politicians the airtime they crave for – at least not in those media that are run by corporations.

Yet, for the wellbeing of society, it remains imperative to do exactly that. Self-evidently, tax revenues that would be collected if states were to prosecute evasion and avoidance like it prosecutes a poor person stealing a bottle of milk from a supermarket, would bring in funds that are critical to the upkeep of a society. 

In other words, tax laws favouring the rich and wealthy corporations represent an injustice and are also bad for a democratic society. Even after well over one hundred years, it still is as Anatole France once said,

The law, in its majestic equality,

forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges,

to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.

Yet, tax evasion deprives countries of much needed funds to fight, for example, global warming, the next and almost inevitable pandemic, mass poverty, crime, and inequality. Unquestionably, the all-defining issue of our time is global warming. 

To tackle global warming, governments need tax-money to undertake critical investments to fight the massive impact of global warming. Beyond that, states also need to invest into science and education, into improving public health, infrastructure, and invest into new technology. 

Meanwhile, two worlds collide. On the one side are governments that need funds to fight global warming and for that, governments depend on public awareness. The public needs to be aware that fighting global warming costs money, and for that, the state needs taxes. It’s one vicious cycle.

On the other side are corporations and in particular media corporations that seek to reduce any awareness to tax corporations to collect the funds to fight, again as an example, global warming. 

As a consequence, media corporations prevent the public to understand that there is a need for taxes, for taxing the rich, and for taxing rich corporations. 

In short, the need for taxes to fight global warming is counteracted by corporate mass media. Yet, media corporations also have a new and powerful ally in all this: online platform serving as right-wing echo-chambers.

Worse, the dominance of the neoliberal ideology over the past forty years – in cahoots with corporate mass media – has made people believe that not everyone needs to pay their fair share of taxes. 

This anti-tax attitude especially assists the wealthy, the super-rich, and more importantly, opulent corporations that do not pay their fair share.

In other words, even though many people have been made to reject – even modestly progressive – taxation, corporations still evade taxes. Worse, tax evasion and the media engineered anti-tax attitude assists the idea that “why should we give our hard-earned money to the taxman when rich people and corporations don’t pay taxes?”

In short, such media engineered attitudes as well as tax evasion, and rising tax inequalities destabilize not just the tax system but also the workings of society’s main institutions (schools, roads, bridges, universities, the police, etc.), and eventually democracy itself.

Put differently, tax evasion deepens not just inequality, but it also assists the deterioration of public trust into democratic (e.g. elected parliaments) and state institutions (schools, hospitals, etc.). Even worse, it also corrodes support for what French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1762) called “the social contract”. 

To stabilize Rousseau’s social contract, to battle tax evasion, and to make corporations to pay taxes, more than 140 countries and territories have supported a minimum tax of a measly 15% on the profits of multinational companies. 

One can, for example, compare the proposed 15% for corporations with the average income tax a worker has to pay in the European Union. The corporate tax is set at 15% while the worker pays 29.64%. 

In other words, a $3.3-trillion-dollar corporation like Microsoft or a $3.2trillion-dollar corporation like Apple would still pay just about half of what a taxi-driver in Italy, a metalworker in Germany, and a school teacher in Sweden would pay in income tax.

Meanwhile, academics and others are kept busy with ever more and ever newer proposals for an always “ambitious” (read: cannot be achieved) and “pragmatic” (read: pro-business) research agenda. 

In order to carry on safeguarding the tax evasion of corporations, states will always and “for the coming” (read: that will keep them busy) years “move towards” (read: not much will happen) of course, a “fairer” tax system (read: reallocating taxes inside the working class so that corporations remain untouched), as one report called it. 

Since carefully pre-selected academics often working in pro-corporate business schools often write such reports, the outcome of “yet another” academic report on tax evasion is almost predetermined. Academic report writing on taxes and tax evasion is often assigned to business schools – on purpose.

Behind the scene, the ideological apparatchiks of the corporate-managerialist university have either closed or starved critical faculties of funding to assure the dominance of the MBA-selling business schools. 

Unsurprisingly, the next report by one or the other business school on tax evasion will also state, “all policymakers should read it”. 

In the end, and even if corporations face the “proposed” 15% midget tax, the tax has already been made fundamentally ineffective by a well-crafted array of tax loopholes specifically created “for” corporations. 

As frequently repeated, nearly all of the key issues remain wholly unaddressed in such reports and in many proposals to end tax evasion. In other words, it is imperative to realize that such reports are not about “what they say” but in what they “do not say”. 

Meanwhile, and after decades of neo-liberalism, tax systems in virtually all major countries are already – and this is important: even more so at the top of the income scale – “regressive”. 

A regressive tax system taxes the lowest income earners, the most (proportionally) while the richest, the least – and many corporations virtually nothing. Surprise, surprise! 

And this is what Warren Buffett meant. He is a super-wealthy person and yet he pays only 17.7% tax while his office workers pay 32.9%. 

This is made worse by a so-called “goods and service tax” (GST) or “value-added tax” (VAT). Let’s say a VAT/GST is 10%. That means consumers must pay 10% on top of what they buy. For example, for a pair of $100 shoes, it would be $110. 

For the Luxembourg banker on $11,000 per month, $10 VAT is a small amount – merely 0.09%. Yet, for a pensioner in, for example, Severozapaden (Bulgaria) on $400 per month: $10.- is 2.5% – a lot of money. In short, a VAT hits the poor disproportionally and the rich next to nothing. 

On the other hand, if everyone had the exact same income, a GST/VAT would be fair. Yet, the opposite is the case as the gap between rich and poor is growing exponentially.

As most, if not almost all, societies have moved from social-democratic progressive taxation towards neo-liberalism’s regressive taxation, the very rich are paying an ever smaller and smaller fraction of their income in taxes compared to those who are not so rich. 

In any case, with an effective tax rate of “0%-0.5%”, the super-rich and billionaires are taxed way less than normal people. 

Meanwhile, the microscopically slow evolution of an international tax cooperation that, at least potentially, might battle tax evasion, is still nowhere in sight. As a consequence, the world is far away from establishing a global minimum tax on corporations and the very rich. 

Beyond a 15% minimum tax on corporations, democratic countries still want to battle tax evasion. However, most countries in the world are not even democratic countries. Democracies are more able to battle tax evasion compared to authoritarian governments. 

Yet, even when countries are democratically governed, they are all too often governed by conservative political parties united under the dominant umbrella-ideology of neo-liberalism. 

All of this is spiced up by corporate lobbying that is becoming more powerful than ever. Given all this, it remains next to impossible to accomplish the goal of eliminating tax evasion.

Yet, confronting tax evasion and destructive tax competition – the infamous race to the bottom – remains essential. Worse, the 2020-2023 Coronavirus crisis not only laid it bare but it even worsened global tax inequalities. 

For the apparatchiks of neo-liberalism, any crisis is a gift from heaven. For them, it was: Never let a serious crisis go to waste: how neoliberalism survived the financial meltdown. 

Neo-liberalism did not only survive the COVID-19 pandemic and the financial meltdown that had occurred years earlier – it actually thrived. 

Regressive taxation as well as tax evasion did rather well during the 2008 crisis where people lost their houses while corporations were generously financed. Relying on taxes they never paid, the “Too Big to Jail” came out swinging.

Meanwhile, the unfolding global warming crisis has made virtually no impact on neoliberal capitalism, tax evasion, and global investments in oil and gas. 

Worse, COP 27 was turned into a Blah-Blah-Blah meeting as the circus of global good-doing elite moved on – in their private jets, of course.

Simultaneously, more and more people are struggling to make ends meet and – unlike many corporations – pay the taxes their governments ask of them. 

Yet, those at the top of the income ladder as well as multi-billion and multi-trillion corporations certainly have the financial means to pay taxes. However, compliant states asphyxiated in the ideology of neo-liberalism still make sure that the rich and rich corporations can escape scot-free. 

Despite the best efforts of global media capitalism, some still remember a time when taxes were seen as something willingly to be paid in a civilized society. 

Some might even remember a time when taxes were seen as being fundamental for a democracy and for something once known as the common good. Today, the common good is an almost offensive idea. Under neo-liberalism, the ideology of “Privatize Everything” dominates. 

That was a bygone era when progressive taxation was seen as a principal instrument through which democratic societies, at least, “regulate” inequality. 

As guided by neo-liberalism over the past decades, various governments have launched “initiatives” (read: as a sideshow) to reduce international tax evasion. These “make believe” efforts include the creation of yet more and always “new” forms of international cooperation. 

This might indicate that the apparatchiks of neoliberal capitalism have learned to no longer block such ideas but to incorporate them into the apparatus to stabilize capitalism. 

Yet, despite showcasing this as – always – “important developments”, unsurprisingly little is known about the workings of these new policies to curb tax evasion. Meanwhile, global tax evasion continues. 

One of the many academic (read: ineffective) reports was done by the EU Tax Observatory in 2021 with another one – labelled Global Tax Evasion Report (2024). 

To add to the camouflaging of tax evasion, it involved “more than 100 researchers all over the world” – sounds impressive!

Yet the report says “some of the practices … are clearly illegal” – shock, horror! Who would have thought of that? Rich people and corporations do illegal things. Unimaginable! And, just uncovered: in 2024!

The next shock came when the report noted that corporations are “failing” to report income earned on offshore bank accounts. The message is: well, everyone fails occasionally. Yet, other corporations operate in a “legal grey zone” between avoidance and evasion. 

In other words, they have – not yet – learned the tricks of the trade. Time to call one of the five headless horsemen of the apocalypse specialising in taxation and exotic accounting: Deloitte, EY, KPMG, PWC and HSBC.

They know how to shift profits to shell companies with no economic substance – these are the infamous letter box companies on a remote island. Other corporations move abroad to benefit from so-called “special tax regimes.” 

These are specifically setup to attract wealthy individuals and corporations. The key idea behind all this is to allow those that have the most to benefit even more from neoliberal globalization and to shrink their tax rates to the lowest level possible.

The inevitable outcome of such a neo-liberal tax regime is lower government revenues for schools and hospitals. Such a tax regime also increases inequality. 

What is never at stake in all this is the “social sustainability” – another ideological feature of neoliberal globalization. The idea of social sustainability – also called corporate social responsibility – is to provide yet another camouflaging ideology that allows corporate capitalism to move on relatively unmolested by an invasive tax system. 

For example, the fact that offshore tax evasion by wealthy individuals has shrunk recently might indicate that they can make use of a standard tax system for tax evasion and tax minimisation purposes. 

Luckily and rather unsurprisingly, the much-trumpeted global minimum tax of 15% on multinational corporations that was put on show in 2021, has been – as the keen observers of media capitalism would have known – most severely weakened. 

This most moderate suggestion was, as expected, accompanied by a growing list of loopholes.

Beyond tax evasion in offshore accounts and loopholes, tax evasion also happens domestically – inside a tax regime in which a corporation operates. No need for offshore banking and no worries about another leaking of millions of secret documents as outlined in the Panama Papers.

Despite all high-sounding reports, investigations, committees, examinations, etc., global billionaires and many corporations continue to have effective tax rates equivalent to between “0% and 0.5%”. 

An outstanding outcome for media capitalism and the global master ideology of neo-liberalism. Yet, the most important product of decades of report-writing on tax evasion is that because of the many reports and commissions looking into tax evasion,

no serious attempt has been made to address this situation.

Any attempt to fight tax evasion and re-introduce a progressive tax system would run the risk of undermining the neoliberal acceptability of the existing pro-corporate tax systems. Pro-business taxation and tax evasion are shielded by the system of media capitalism. This system consists of an “interest symbiosis” between: 

• corporate mass media broadcasting the ideology of neo-liberalism,
• political parties asphyxiated inside the neoliberal ideology and states,
• the apparatchiks of neo-liberalism in business schools and think tanks, and 
• multinational corporations 

Their combined power virtually assures that even the most modest proposals to address tax evasion will never become a reality – no matter how miniscule such proposals are. Even when such proposals are as modest as to suggest:

• to institute a global minimum tax on billionaires – equal to a tiny 2% of their wealth – that alone would raise an estimated $250 billion annually.
• strengthening of existing tax laws on multinational companies and close, at least, some of the many loopholes put in place “for” corporations – that would raise a further $250 billion annually.

In other words, tax policy is about big money – very big money! These extremely modest proposals – a 2% mini-tax on billionaires and strictly applying existing tax laws as well as closing some loopholes – would already raise a whopping half a trillion dollars ($500bn).

Yet, the ideological power of neo-liberalism combined with the real power of corporations and their corporate lobbying, think tanks, business schools as well as the public opinions-shaping power of the oligopoly of media corporations 

(Bertelsmann, Paramount Global, Sony Corporation, Murdoch’s News Corp, Comcast, Walt Disney, Warner Bros., Fox Corporation, Hearst Communications, Amazon, Grupo Globo (South America), and France’s Lagardère Group, not to mention the 3bn Facebook user, the 2.5bn YouTube watchers, and 2bn Instagram users) 

virtually assures that billionaires and no-tax paying corporations are left unmolested. In that way, they can continue to get even more rich and even more powerful. They do so as the public watches The Kardashians and before that: the Gilmore Girls, Friends, Buffy and I love Lucy – the list is, of course, endless. 

With the public suitably distracted, capitalism thrives just as well as tax evasion.

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Born on the foothills of Castle Frankenstein, Thomas Klikauer (PhD) is the author of a 995 publications, including a book on “The AfD”.

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