I have a brilliant idea! Put it in boxes! Noone will find it!

Raziaar

Raziaar

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Oh But they did.

Pretty crude tax evasion scheme. Hiding 58 million dollars worth of inheritance money in some boxes and hope it is never discovered and you have to give it up.

Japanese authorities on Tuesday arrested two sisters for allegedly hiding some 58 million dollars in cardboard boxes to evade tax on their inheritance, an official said.

It was the largest sum of inheritance money ever concealed from authorities in Japan, said the official from the National Tax Agency, which arrested the women in cooperation with police in the western city of Osaka.
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Personally, I think inheritance should be tax free. One of your family members works hard to make a living for themselves, or perhaps they inherited it. But the magic of leaving it on to others seems a little bit robbed to me, when the government takes a good chunk of it.

I feel taxes are fine and dandy on many things... but, taxes on inheritance? What do you guys think?
 
yeah i agree inheritance should be tax free. i guess inheritance is counted as income so you have to pay taxes for it or something, i don't really know alot about these things.
 
Inheritance tax is a bit shitty, and often its implementation is simply an excuse by government to get more money. And since one of the reasons people work so hard is to leave a good life for their children, you can be damned sure they're going to work almost as hard on finding loopholes and tax havens through which to transmit, with as little loss as possible, the means to live that life. Of all taxes imposed it's probably the one which most invites (or provokes) evasion.

On the other hand, the whole problem with inheritance is that it fundamentally breaks capitalism, because unless you have the state set up in a clever way which can provide actual equality of opportunity, then it begins to distort things and you can no longer safetly assume that "everybody gets a fair chance". But then, inheritance tax doesn't necessarily solve that problem, does it? It may give the government more funding to help society, but also to hinder it. You might rather expect them to ramp inheritance tax right up and then distribute the funds that they take equally throughout the society. Every time a really rich person died, everyone's income would go up slightly, and there would be a big party.

Of course, all the rich people would go somewhere else and use tax havens, or the economy would lamify or something.

Conclusion? Inheritance tax is a pretty uncool guy.

EDIT: I calculate that if Rupert Murdoch distributed his money equally across the population of the UK, everyone would get 65 quid. Er...score.
I suppose it's enough for a night out, at least.
 
I think inheritance tax is a pretty cool guy eh provokes evasion and doesnt afraid of anything!!
 
Urgh, inheritance tax has possibly one of the worst excuses behind it that I've seen. It's just absurd. While I applaud them for their attempts, it's still illegal :|
 
Yeah, tax free all the way. Here in perth it's tax free. Back home it's not the government takes all it can get and even if you could complain, it wouldn't do anything
 
You see instead of 'inheriting' the money, they should be 'given' it as a 'gift'.
 
canada doesnt have inheritance tax ..what it does have is capital gains tax ..if I purchase a house today and 30 years from now my kids inherit it they dont pay takes on the purchase of the house (you dont pay taxes on the purchase price of any home) ..however if I purchase a house and use it as a rental unit 30 years down the road my kids will have to pay capital gains tax because it's a business asset; I'm making money from the property ..the tax is based on the difference from what the price was when I bought it and what it's worth at time of sale ..granted there are ways around it ..I can gift the house to my kids so long as I dont make any profit on it
 
So once a home is used as a rental, even if it's only for a few years, it will forever be classified as a business asset?
 
no, if you live in it and rent out part of the home you dont have to pay capital gains ..or even if you own the house, dont live there but an immediate family member does live there then it can be exempt ..it's mostly to tax people who are in the business of renting out property
 
Well, see... this is involved in Alaska and not Canada... but my uncle lived in his house there for quite a few years, and I spent quite a few years living there too.

Now that he's in Texas(which by coincidence is where I am now too), he has been renting out that house for a few years. He does intend to move there again in like 5 years or so, when he can... but until then he will continue renting it out to keep paying for it.
 
I think he can date the taxes he owns on the captial gains to when he moved out and used it as a rental property ..so 5 years of captial gains isnt all that much

btw I'm speaking strictly from a canadian law POV, I'm not familiar with american property tax laws
 
Oh I can almost assure you, without having any knowledge about them, that they're probably far more ass-rape oriented.
 
well the interwebs is always going on and on how canadians pay such high taxes in comparison to americans (on account of free healthcare, socialism/communism and stuff)..so if anything we're prety good at ass raping ourselves
 
it's based exclusively on current market value ..so if you bought the house for say $100k and then sold it for $400K you pay the captial gains ..or the taxes on the difference between what you first paid and what it's worth now ..so in this case you're taxed on $300K
 
I fully support inheritance tax, in the UK only a very small percentage of people will be effected by it, it only comes into play when large sums of money are involved. I think it should be increased.
 
Solaris said:
I think it should be increased.
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I do not. You'll find yourself suffering when you come to inherit money. It applies to everyone, not just a small proportion of people. I'd prefer it if it were more heavily banded in order to accomplish its "goal" more effectively.
 
Solaris said:
I fully support inheritance tax, in the UK only a very small percentage of people will be effected by it, it only comes into play when large sums of money are involved. I think it should be increased.
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so if your father who has been working in a coal mine all his life, dies of black lung and leaves your family $20,000 that just covers his funeral and straightening up his affairs should be taxed on it?

..inheritence does not mean >10 million dollars like it does in movies

"omg my long lost uncle left me $10 trillion dollars ..all I have to do is spend the weekend at this haunted house"
 
Druckles said:
I do not. You'll find yourself suffering when you come to inherit money. It applies to everyone, not just a small proportion of people. I'd prefer it if it were more heavily banded in order to accomplish its "goal" more effectively.
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No it doesn't.

If someone left me a few thousand pounds, I would not pay any tax on it. The same would probably apply with a couple of hundred thousand. I challenge you too prove me wrong.
 
DEATHMASTER said:
You see instead of 'inheriting' the money, they should be 'given' it as a 'gift'.
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Not really sure about this, but my Japanese teacher told us once that even gift-money is subject to government regulations in Japan. For example, when somebody dies, people presents the family with small (or big) amounts of money to cover funeral expenses. Someone is in charge of receiving it and registering how much accumulated and if anything is left after paying all that had to be paid, that money has to be donated to charity or something like that (I don't remember where the money goes to).
 
I believe the bands are looser in the UK. But my mum, who has lived in poverty for at least as long as I've been alive, was bequeathed a cottage in Ireland by an aunt who didn't understand how the tax worked, and came to suffer under that country's BS inheritance laws.

The cottage wasn't worth much at all. It was decrepit and needed 1000's of pounds of work to be liveable. It was my mum's childhood home, however, it had been in the family for a very long time, and all her brothers and sisters had been raised there too. If you have any irish family you'll realise how crazily anal they get over their land and the concept of 'going home' some day, if they're living elsewhere. The inheritance tax, however, came to some ridiculous figure in the 1000's that we had no hope of ever paying out of our own pocket and so she was faced with no choice other than to sell it out of the family, which she was absolutely loath to do. Luckily, she eventually managed to procure a loan from another well-off relative of ours at the last minute which allowed her to hang onto the cottage (although she still had the burden of many 1000's of debt hanging over her). Had the house been sold, that would have been a hell of a lot of money to evaporate into the hands of the government, estate agents, solicitors, et al, all at the expense of a family that never had 2 coins to rub together.

The principle of taxing inheritance might seem like it only affects the stupendously rich, but when it affects them it only affects them to a negligible degree. When it comes to affect ordinary people of ordinary means, on the other hand, it screws them over big style.

BTW, gifts are still taxable afaik, if they were given within a certain period prior to the death of the giver.
 
CptStern said:
so if your father who has been working in a coal mine all his life, dies of black lung and leaves your family $20,000 that just covers his funeral and straightening up his affairs should be taxed on it?
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Are you not familiar with the concept of tax brackets/bands? :p

I think inheritance tax is fine. The government provides the infrastructure and security for the economy, which in turn lets you make money. You have to give back for that.
 
Solution:

before you die, wire all your money to the person you want to give it to, or write them various post-dated checks, or just withdraw a few wads of cash and give it to them. :|
 
It's rather silly to have to pay taxes on something that has already been taxed (the inheritance was most likely someone's income).
 
PvtRyan said:
It's rather silly to have to pay taxes on something that has already been taxed (the inheritance was most likely someone's income).
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That's precisely my thoughts. The inheritance you receive is from the money saved by that person over their lifetime, be it in the bank or tied up in property. Regardless they would have paid a mortgage to own the house through their life. This income was therefore undoubtably TAXED, and the savings are what is left over from that. I see inheritance tax as the government saying "We'll have seconds now thank you". It angers me as I saw my grandparents get screwed by it, and I'd have liked them to have as much money as possible to enjoy themselves and be comfortable for the rest of their lives...
 
Hectic Glenn said:
That's precisely my thoughts. The inheritance you receive is from the money saved by that person over their lifetime, be it in the bank or tied up in property. Regardless they would have paid a mortgage to own the house through their life. This income was therefore undoubtably TAXED, and the savings are what is left over from that. I see inheritance tax as the government saying "We'll have seconds now thank you". It angers me as I saw my grandparents get screwed by it, and I'd have liked them to have as much money as possible to enjoy themselves and be comfortable for the rest of their lives...
Click to expand...

This. Inheritance tax is just the government's way of being greedy and taking more of what they already took from you.
 
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