Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Let's be clear about terms:
"Tax avoidance" is minimising your tax payments by legal means.
"Tax evasion" is not paying taxes that the law requires you to pay, and is a crime.
Where does the money to fund essential services come from if not from tax revenue?
The reason that I personally consider tax evasion to be a rather despicable crime is that the people who do it are presumably happy to use the services that the taxes paid by honest people provide, while choosing not to pay a contribution to those services themselves.
However, as you say, people feel differently about this.
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Your comments are not unreasonable for those evaders who pay no tax or only a token amount, effectively not contributing at all. But the reality is that most evasion is relatively small scale. A tradesman who does some cash jobs and "forgets" to declare the cash for income tax and charge the VAT or GST etc as the case may be comes to mind. Avoider's to seldom pay no or insignificant tax depending on the "scheme", but they do pay nice fees to their lawyers and accountants to advise and set them up. It is not too far from the ttuth to say that evasion is the avoidance of the masses!