Interestingly, contamination of the forensic equipment was considered early on already. However, due to the geographic area of the findings and initial negative control tests using fresh swabs, they ruled it out.
> Washington
CNN
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The Obama administration secretly arranged a plane delivery of $400 million in cash on the same day Iran released four American prisoners and formally implemented the nuclear deal, US officials confirmed Wednesday.
Secretly-ish - it was announced publicly 7 months prior (Jan 2016) and it was the first instalment of a legal settlement, not just some random or ransom payment.
Obviously Republicans decried it with bad faith bullshit because reality and sanity don't matter to them.
While the optics of this may look bad, the same thing happens after armed conflict too; the US has spent boatloads of money in Afghanistan on top of all the military costs, and we're basically in the same situation as before.
And the bad faith keeps on rolling. We get it, you're a MAGA true believer, it's not like you're being subtle. But besides trying to troll the good people at HN, what is your point?
Google's main revenue source (~ 75%) is advertising. They will absolutely try to shove in ads into their AI offerings. They simply don't have to do it this quickly.
Stripe never claimed to handle tax however. Merchants have to handle tax on their own. This is no different than accepting cash or using a card terminal in your shop. The payment processor does not handle your tax for you.
There is no credit card terminal in the whole EU which is not tied to a point-of-sale system, which only purpose is to create INVOICES. Somehow the Stripe team forgot that fact.
I find your critique not very sensible. Point-of-sale systems are not necessarily tied to the payment terminal just because they communicate to each other. If companies choose to use Stripe they do have to set up their own invoicing and tax handling. Your comment makes it sound like Stripe hides this fact and thus users end up not handling tax or invoices because they were mislead. But if you run any kind of businesses being on top of taxes is obviously paramount. I don’t quite get your gripe here.
Stripe has built-in features for merchants to create invoices and receipts.
Stripe does KYC for their merchants and exactly know that they are a company of certain type from the US.
Stripe facilitates a sale of digital goods between the US-based merchant and EU-based consumer. At this point the US-based merchant is obligated to pay the VAT and create an INVOICE.
Only Stripe knows from which EU country the customer comes from. The US-based merchant does not know which EU country the customer comes from.
Therefore Stripe is obligated to calculate the applicable VAT (based on country of customer) for the transaction and deduct it fromt he payment amount. STRIPE IS NOT DOING THIS.
And once payment is made Stripe does not enforce the merchant to provide an invoice, even though Stripe knows exactly it just facilitated a sale of digital goods between US-based company and EU-based customer. Stripe even enables the merchant to put fantasy information into the receipts and invoices, they don't have valid company name, addresses, or registration numbers.
Stripe also allows their merchants who just did a transaction to EU customer to only offer a "receipt", with no sign of an invoice. This "receipt" can contain a single website url, it can contain total fantasy name, it does not need to contain an address, or even a country of the Stripe merchant. It does not contain a company registration number or jurisdiction of the Stripe merchant. It does not contain company type or legal company name of the Stripe merchant. EVEN THOUGH STRIPE KNOWS ALL OF THIS BECAUSE THEY KYC THEIR MERCHANTS.
This is in total violation of any EU accounting rules which also applied to Ireland where the Stripe EU HQ is.
Luckily Stripe lawyers know exactly that they are systematically aiding and abetting tax fraud against the European Union and once you press the proper regulatory buttons they will cave, and after months of stonewalling suddenly their merchants are forced to provide their FULL COMPANY NAME AND COMPANY REGISTRATION NUMBER AND COUNTRY OF OPERATION, and actually state VAT in the invoice.
But their default mode of operation is "We are located in Ireland, EU law applies to us, we know EU customer buys digital goods from US merchant, we KYD'd the merchant but still we ignore that EU VAT applies to the transaction".
Any accountants and lawyers working for Stripe Ireland should be disbarred just on the fact they are associated with this systematic tax fraud.
There was no systematic remediation of the situation - even though Stripe knows about tax fraud by a merchant, they will only restate the invoices FOR THE SINGLE CUSTOMER THAT COMPLAINS ABOUT IT instead of forcing the merchant to properly create invoices for every single transaction with EU customers of that merchant.
Show me a tax agency in your country which allows you to get away with this. It is highly criminal, systematic behavior, clearly targeted against the European Union.
The SE has a minimum capital requirement of 120k € so is not within reach for most people. I think this EU-Inc would be a simple structure with a lower threshold.
I am absolutely for it. There are too many different types of company structures in the individual EU countries and they don’t work well when you move and come with all sorts of different risks. Obviously many are also just cumbersome to start and dissolve. You could start five US LLCs within ten minutes of filling out some online forms whereas to start one European entity depending on the country you might have to make a notary appointment, register with the national registry and the tax authority. I think there’s a lot of room for improvement which can take days to weeks.
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