Startup idea: Company that cheaply sets up individuals/small companies to evade taxes in the same way big corporations do. You pay a subscription fee or something and they fill out the returns and set up a PO Box in Bermuda or whatever.
Seriously! Reading the article made me think, "wow, trying to piece together where companies go and who owns what sounds like fun!" (No, I'm not a lawyer.) Certainly sounds like an optimization problem where a computer could do an especially good job (assuming that you can represent everything efficiently).
There are tons of companies who sell shelf companies online. ie. $800 and we ship you a corp registration, a bank account, an office address etc.
For small companies with a single office etc., that is all that an offshore tax structure is.
The point is that when you structure these things, you don't want anybody to notice and you want to be a small target. Being a client of a startup whose intended purpose is to minimize your tax bill is the opposite of remaining unnoticed.
I was going to ask: how can startups (and in particular YC companies) apply similar strategies once they start making revenue? And how can they scale out? What would be really interesting is to see the evolution of the corporate/tax structure of Google as the company grew.
