It’s a HUGE waste and drain on productivity.
It is not like that. Say, Santa Clara County changes property from 1.25% to 2.5%, For company like Apple, they need to account all Santa Clara county complexes recalculate property tax pro-rated from the date of changes and pay to the county.
Not only apple, any company own property in Santa Clara needs to calculate and pay correct, other 10% penalty !
Similar to this, Texas county or some Florida county or somewhere else county changes property tax rate, if Apple has complexes they need to calculate correct tax and pay to them.
Similarly, world wide corporation needs to calculate every country (say China, Japan or India), state, …any changes in sales tax, property tax, corporate tax…etc almost 50 different kinds of taxes changes, they need to calculate.
You can expect daily one tax rule changes somewhere in the world, some places taxes are changing and they need to calculate and pay them. Otherwise, those government agencies impose hefty fines and legal challenges to continue the company operations.
This is the same way EU raised 16 Bln tax audit on Apple and apple has to fight against such issues with big team of EU tax lawyers and local EU tax CPAs !
This is not easy task for any company !
Yes. It’s a huge waste and drain on productivity. Think about all the employees that contribute zero to the product. That all ends up on the cost of the product. It’s a waste.
You can manually fill up 1040 or 540 CA form.
Since the tax is complex, we use Intuit tax software or CPA.
Do you ever think CPA is waste or Intuit Tax software is waste of money?
If you make it bigger scale for corporations like Apple, Google, and Facebook, they needed such infrastructure.
All of that is only needed because of tax complexity. It’s adding expenses to the corporation that have zero to do with the product or service. If we eliminated tax complexity, the govnernment and corporations would save billions a year in compliance and enforcement costs. Products and services from the US would cost less and be more competitive globally. The tax system being so complex is a giant waste of money. It’s a man made construct that’s not adding value to products and services.
2 Likes
May also want to review the legal system too. Too many ambulance chasers and frivolous lawsuits. A law to limit the power of judges to award damages and a professional ban on predatory lawyers. Some claims are ludicrous. The complex tax system and threats of law suits raise the cost of products and services significantly.
1 Like
Huge waste of our society:
- Lawyer
- IRS and tax professional
- Government bureaucracy
IRS and tax professional is the means for the big government bureaucracy
2 Likes
First, blaming on government or society will lead to no man’s land ! What are we going to solve by blaming them?
Practically, I see the benefit of tax experts.
1 Like
You’re missing the entire point. The point is people should demand a simple tax system. We’d all spend less money on complying with tax laws. Corporations would spend less on it. It would allow products to cost less. There’s no benefit to society in having an insanely complex tax code that’s over 70,000 pages.
Plus, tax rules distort what should be economic decisions.
1 Like
Purpose of tax system:
a. Collect revenue to fund government operation; and
b. Influence (“distort”) economic decisions to encourage certain technology advances or discourage certain social behavior.
However, I think tax code has become too complex through time. So complex that I doubt law makers (I could have underestimated their ability) appreciate the implications of the tax codes. IMHO, a simpler tax code benefits everybody except the tax experts 
and turbotax
1 Like
Don’t forget, Geithner owed back taxes before he became secretary of treasury which overseas the IRS. The tax code is so complex he didn’t realize he owed payroll taxes on his salary earned while working at the IMF. It’s over 70,000 pages.
1 Like
For corporation, not only US tax laws are challenging, every state tax law matters, every county matters. In addition, companies like Apple has to file taxes for every province of China, Singapore, Malaysia, EU states, India, Brazil, Mexico, Russia…entire set of countries, state and city taxes. This is the main reason, companies like Apple, google, face book and amazon files more than 10000 tax filing an year.
It is not easy as every country may have 75000 pages documents. This is same for Trump Empire wherever he owns properties !
1 Like
I wonder if the finance team completely failed, or if management was told about the risk and ignored it. I’ve seen people fired over much smaller controllership failures. It’s not rocket science to forecast your headcount spending based on the open reqs and hiring ramp. That’s actually pretty easy to do within 1-3% accuracy for each quarter.
Yeah, saw this coming since last Christmas shopping season when deliveries of their flagship 85" tv were reportedly delayed to folks who prepaid upfront. The folks who did eventually get their tvs like them for the most part, but like any new tech there are issues. If this company can right its ship and get back to being lean and mean it might make it at least with the tvs since there is a lot of bang for the buck.
Geez, can I get the Honda/Toyota version of the home battery pack? Probably more reliable and certainly more cheaper…
It’s super easy for anyone in the electric/hybrid car business to offer this product. Plus, they’d get more scale and better pricing for their battery packs. It’d help lower the cost of electric/hybrid cars.
Did you say you’re in Project Titan?
Nope. I worked on hybrid and electric cars years ago though before it was cool. My thesis was powertrain selection for a Ford EV.
Elon!!!