Vistas de página en total

viernes, 31 de mayo de 2013

Bitcoin y las monedas virtuales con problemas legales en EU


http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/dc18a5be-c872-11e2-8cb7-00144feab7de.html#axzz2UtULVYG6


Virtual currencies run into legal trouble in US


A pile of bitcoins©Getty
Bitcoin usage may run into trouble over costs involved in acceding to state demands that they root out illicit uses
According to the website Localbitcoins.com, in the US alone there are more than 2,000 people in 650 towns and cities who want to sell you Bitcoins for cash, right now.
Transactions in the virtual currency, which came to mainstream attention this year, are anonymous and untraceable – and they are increasingly drawing the scrutiny of law enforcement authorities who fear they will become a tool of money launderers.

Market capitalisation and number of transactions

Market capitalisation and number of transactions

More

ON THIS STORY

IN CURRENCIES

A string of legal actions and regulatory manoeuvres in the US in recent weeks has made life more complicated for people who hope to make a living from trading virtual currencies, which are created by individuals or companies instead of governments, and which are used outside the traditional banking system.
A glance at the US section of Localbitcoins.com elicits a stark warning from one legal expert.
“You better get yourself registered, or you better get your name off the list real fast,” says Carol Van Cleef, a partner in Patton Boggs’ banking practice and an adviser on anti-money laundering policies.
The bout of concern over the future of virtual currencies was sparked this week as the Department of Justice and the US Treasury moved against Liberty Reserve, the creators of “LR”, a currency that a criminal complaint said was used to launder the proceeds of credit card fraud, identity theft, investment fraud, computer hacking, child pornography and narcotics trafficking.
 Register for FT.com
If you enjoy currencies articles like these, register today on FT.com to see up to eight free stories a month
The action comes less than a fortnight after the Department of Homeland Security seized the US bank accounts of the largest Bitcoin exchange, saying its owner had failed to register the company as a money services business (MSB).
Criminals are always the first adopters. They will hit it and hit it, and they will keep hitting it until controls are put in place
- Carol Van Cleef, Patton Boggs
One of Bitcoin’s early uses was as the currency of choice for buyers and sellers of drugs on the website Silk Road, although its supporters point to a gathering number of legitimate businesses that use it.
But the burgeoning number of virtual currencies, and the wave of entrepreneurial interest in building payments systems on the back of them, could be held back by the costs of acceding to government demands that they root out illicit uses. This could particularly be the case with Bitcoin and similar experiments, which rely on a decentralised and anonymous network of computers around the world to manage transactions.
“Criminals are always the first adopters,” Ms Van Cleef says. “They will hit it and hit it, and they will keep hitting it until controls are put in place.”
For the libertarians who have been drawn to virtual currencies as a means of wresting economic control from governments and central banks, recent developments have put them in a spot, she adds.
“This is the issue for those people who do not believe in government, they are going to have to ‘cut a deal with the devil’. If they are in the financial services world, they are going to have to recognise that.”
This is by no means accepted across the Bitcoin community.
“People are way too US-centric when discussing Bitcoin,” says Erik Voorhees, an early evangelist for the currency, who moved from the US to Panama to pursue his business ventures.
“Bitcoin’s early successes will not be in the US. They will be in the developing world where a banking system is practically non-existent, or where currencies are being destroyed, such as in Argentina. US Bitcoin businesses absolutely need to follow the US regulations or they’ll be shut down, and that doesn’t help anyone, but US regulations do not apply to, for example, a Kenyan company doing business with Kenyans.”
Venture capital money has flowed into Bitcoin payments businesses on the theory that the currency could be used to increase the speed and reduce the cost of international transactions, even through the US.

In depth

Bitcoin
Increased trading in the decentralised virtual currency has begun to attract the attention of regulators
In March, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, a division of the US Treasury, clarified that all virtual currency exchangers needed to register as MSBs, and to set up procedures to identify and report suspicious transactions, in the same way as traditional banks must.
Since then, some Bitcoin businesses have reportedhaving their accounts shut down by their banks.
Steve Hudak, spokesman for FinCEN, says it is not the Treasury’s intention to stifle innovation in virtual currencies.
“We do expect banks to assess their risk tolerance and assess their customers, but we certainly did not intend to label all these businesses as unfit for banking,” he says. “Our intention is only to set out what they need to do to make themselves legitimate under FinCEN regulations.”

jueves, 30 de mayo de 2013

TEM_SF

Aviso

Las notas finales del Taller estarán registradas después del 5 de junio, pues aún está pendiente la evaluación de uno de sus compañeros.

Saludos cordiales

miércoles, 29 de mayo de 2013

Stiglitz: La globalización no es sólo sobre beneficios, sino también sobre impuestos

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/27/globalisation-is-about-taxes-too

Globalisation isn't just about profits. It's about taxes too

Big corporates are gaming one nation's taxpayers against another's: we need a global deal to make them pay their way
Daniel Pudles 28052013
Why should German taxpayers help bail out a country whose business model is based on avoidance and a race to the bottom? Illustration by Daniel Pudles
The world looked on agog as Tim Cook, the head of Apple, said his company had paid all the taxes owed – seeming to say that it paid all the taxes it should have paid. There is, of course, a big difference between the two. It's no surprise that a company with the resources and ingenuity of Apple would do what it could to avoid paying as much tax as it could within the law. While the supreme court, in its Citizens United case seems to have said that corporations are people, with all the rights attendant thereto, this legal fiction didn't endow corporations with a sense of moral responsibility; and they have the Plastic Man capacity to be everywhere and nowhere at the same time – to be everywhere when it comes to selling their products, and nowhere when it comes to reporting the profits derived from those sales.
Apple, like Google, has benefited enormously from what the US and other western governments provide: highly educated workers trained in universities that are supported both directly by government and indirectly (through generous charitable deductions). The basic research on which their products rest was paid for by taxpayer-supported developments – the internet, without which they couldn't exist. Their prosperity depends in part on our legal system – including strong enforcement of intellectual property rights; they asked (and got) government to force countries around the world to adopt our standards, in some cases, at great costs to the lives and development of those in emerging markets and developing countries. Yes, they brought genius and organisational skills, for which they justly receive kudos. But while Newton was at least modest enough to note that he stood on the shoulders of giants, these titans of industry have no compunction about being free riders, taking generously from the benefits afforded by our system, but not willing to contribute commensurately. Without public support, the wellspring from which future innovation and growth will come will dry up – not to say what will happen to our increasingly divided society.
It is not even true that higher corporate tax rates would necessarily significantly decrease investment. As Apple has shown, it can finance anything it wants to with debt – including paying dividends, another ploy to avoid paying their fair share of taxes. But interest payments are tax deductible – which means that to the extent that investment is debt-financed, the cost of capital and returns are both changed commensurately, with no adverse effect on investment. And with the low rate of taxation on capital gains, returns on equity are treated even more favorably. Still more benefits accrue from other details of the tax code, such as accelerated depreciation and the tax treatment of research and development expenditures.
It is time the international community faced the reality: we have an unmanageable, unfair, distortionary global tax regime. It is a tax system that is pivotal in creating the increasing inequality that marks most advanced countries today – with America standing out in the forefront and the UK not far behind. It is the starving of the public sector which has been pivotal in America no longer being the land of opportunity – with a child's life prospects more dependent on the income and education of its parents than in other advanced countries.
Globalisation has made us increasingly interdependent. These international corporations are the big beneficiaries of globalisation – it is not, for instance, the average American worker and those in many other countries, who, partly under the pressure from globalisation, has seen his income fully adjusted for inflation, including the lowering of prices that globalisation has brought about, fall year after year, to the point where a fulltime male worker in the US has an income lower than four decades ago. Our multinationals have learned how to exploit globalisation in every sense of the term – including exploiting the tax loopholes that allow them to evade their global social responsibilities.
The US could not have a functioning corporate income tax system if we had elected to have a transfer price system (where firms "make up" the prices of goods and services that one part buys from another, allowing profits to be booked to one state or another). As it is, Apple is evidently able to move profits around to avoid Californian state taxes. The US has developed a formulaic system, where global profits are allocated on the basis of employment, sales and capital goods. But there is plenty of room to further fine-tune the system in response to the easier ability to shift profits around when a major source of the real "value-added" is intellectual property.
Some have suggested that while the sources of production (value added) are difficult to identify, the destination is less so (though with reshipping, this may not be so clear); they suggest a destination-based system. But such a system would not necessarily be fair – providing no revenues to the countries that have borne the costs of production. But a destination system would clearly be better than the current one.
Even if the US were not rewarded for its global publicly supported scientific contributions and the intellectual property built on them, at least the country would be rewarded for its unbridled consumerism, which provides incentives for such innovation. It would be good if there could be an international agreement on the taxation of corporate profits. In the absence of such an agreement, any country that threatened to impose fair corporate taxes would be punished – production (and jobs) would be taken elsewhere. In some cases, countries can call their bluff. Others may feel the risk is too high. But what cannot be escaped are customers.
The US by itself could go a long way to moving reform along: any firm selling goods there could be obliged to pay a tax on its global profits, at say a rate of 30%, based on a consolidated balance sheet, but with a deduction for corporate profits taxes paid in other jurisdictions (up to some limit). In other words, the US would set itself up as enforcing a global minimum tax regime. Some might opt out of selling in the US, but I doubt that many would.
The problem of multinational corporate tax avoidance is deeper, and requires more profound reform, including dealing with tax havens that shelter money for tax-evaders and facilitate money-laundering. Google and Apple hire the most talented lawyers, who know how to avoid taxes staying within the law. But there should be no room in our system for countries that are complicitous in tax avoidance. Why should taxpayers in Germany help bail out citizens in a country whose business model was based on tax avoidance and a race to the bottom – and why should citizens in any country allow their companies to take advantage of these predatory countries?
To say that Apple or Google simply took advantage of the current system is to let them off the hook too easily: the system didn't just come into being on its own. It was shaped from the start by lobbyists from large multinationals. Companies like General Electric lobbied for, and got, provisions that enabled them to avoid even more taxes. They lobbied for, and got, amnesty provisions that allowed them to bring their money back to the US at a special low rate, on the promise that the money would be invested in the country; and then they figured out how to comply with the letter of the law, while avoiding the spirit and intention. If Apple and Google stand for the opportunities afforded by globalisation, their attitudes towards tax avoidance have made them emblematic of what can, and is, going wrong with that system.


viernes, 24 de mayo de 2013

TEM_Sector Financiero: Actividades para la semana próxima.

Para el próximo lunes no olviden llevar su trabajo acerca de su portafolio, por escrito, con las postura del día de inicio de la conformación y  de hoy, viernes, día de cierre.  Así como el análisis fundamental que explique las razones de su conformación y la explicación de los resultados.

Asimismo no olviden repasar sus tareas porque el lunes y el miércoles analizaremos los temáticas vistas a lo largo del curso.

Abajo les presento una lectura sugerida para vacaciones que seguramente algunos ya habrán leído.

R. Kiyosaki "La principal razón por la cual las personas luchan financieramente es porque han pasado años en colegios, pero no aprendieron nada acerca del dinero. El resultado es que aprenden a trabajar por el dinero pero nunca aprenden a tener dinero trabajando para ellos,"

link:

Padre Rico,  Padre Pobre,       R. Kiyosaki

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B3sm77SZEkk0Y1MtdmZCWl8zMTQ/edit?usp=sharing

miércoles, 22 de mayo de 2013

Apple: ingeniería financiera y contable para pagar menos impuestos, descentralizando sus activos e inversiones en paraísos fiscales

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/05c10598-c227-11e2-8992-00144feab7de.html







http://www.cgdev.org/blog/appletax-its-not-just-apple


   
This week the US Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations has been grilling Apple (sorry) on its tax avoidance. As with similar investigations in the UK, the subcommittee is asking whether major companies are sidestepping their obligation to pay taxes in countries where they do a great deal of business.  While it’s hard to feel sympathetic to obfuscating witnesses from multinational companies and major accounting firms, the real villain of the piece is nowhere present: the international tax system.
The subcommittee started in a strong position, having forced Apple to give up evidence on its tax strategies that senators Carl Levin and John McCain, the chair and ranking member of the committee, made public in a damning 37-page memorandum. It shows that Apple not only shifted profits to low-tax jurisdictions including Ireland, but actually managed to achieve the holy grail of tax minimisation: to earn profits that appear to occur in no tax jurisdiction:
Apple Operations International, which from 2009 to 2012 reported net income of $30 billion, but declined to declare any tax residence, filed no corporate income tax return, and paid no corporate income taxes to any national government for five years. A second Irish affiliate, Apple Sales International, received $74 billion in sales income over four years, but due in part to its alleged status as a non-tax resident, paid taxes on only a tiny fraction of that income.
Apple’s prepared response seemed to miss many of the subcommittee’s points, arguing mainly that they pay a lot of tax in the US – and offering little to justify or shed light on the subcommittee’s findings. The hearing itself was at points heated, as Sen. Levin repeatedly interrupted roundabout responses to demand specific answers. This was the second part of the subcommittee’s examination of Offshore Profit Shifting and the US Tax Code (for the first, see here).  
Meanwhile, in the UK, the Public Accounts Committee of the UK House of Commons published a report Monday on tax avoidance by multinational companies. On Tuesday, the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee took evidence from major accounting firms and leading tax justice campaigners, as part of their enquiry into ‘Taxing corporations in a global economy’.
These official probes and complementary investigative reporting by a growing number of media organisations suggest you needn’t look very far to find fairly obvious patterns of profit-shifting. Indeed, for major multinational companies, it is simply the norm. Putting one company on show is valuable to illustrate the problems for a wider audience but risks leaving the impression that particular behaviour is exceptional – when in fact there is a consistent pattern.
It’s a pattern that should, of course, concern us. Without effective taxation, state sovereignty is weakened along with state-citizen relations and the social contract. Domestic businesses suffer from an uneven playing field, as multinational companies out-compete them not on efficiency grounds but through their ability to minimise tax liabilities. Developing countries are particularly badly hit, with limited capacity to challenge abuse and a more urgent need for revenues for basic social spending.
Arguably the more interesting part of the Tuesday’s US hearing was the final session, with witnesses from the IRS and Treasury. Mark Mazur’s testimony acknowledged, albeit a little grudgingly, the scale of US tax losses to profit-shifting behavior. But he went on to argue that the current system can be saved by tweaks to transfer pricing guidelines and the ad hoc closing of some loopholes.
Trying to tax bits of a multinational group as if they were separate entities is a busted flush, relying on imaginary ‘correct’ prices for internal transfers of goods, services and intellectual property. In practice, there is increasing use of mechanisms to allocate profit without use of transfer prices. With US support, the OECD’s current work on Base Erosion and Profit Shifting could make these more coherent. The first step is basic transparency: to require public, combined and country-by-country reporting from multinational groups, so that rather than finger pointing at rotten apples, the systemic issues are laid bare.