Comment by scrollaway
8 months ago
When it comes to laws and taxes, "comply" and "evade" tend to be synonyms.
"In order to comply with tax regulations and donor laws, we had to structure our activities in order to make it possible for political donations to be classified as regular consulting income".
At least from discussions I've had over the years with my accountants, comply and evade are very different. Evasion is when you are doing something that's explicitly illegal. Optimization and compliance is when you comply with the law while trying as much as possible to reduce your tax. In some cases, there's a bit of a grey area where you use multiple structures that according to your accountant should comply with the law but in a way that has never actually been tested legally. That last part tends to be named "optimization" rather than "compliance"
This is in part why good laws are more concerned with what “it” is rather than what “it” is called. Good laws define something and then name it, so that you can test a pattern of facts and determine whether “it” is indeed what the law covers.
For me, my corporate tax professional errs on the side of well tested strategies or those that the IRS has ruled on administratively, and that is perfect for my risk tolerance.