Thank you.
I'm reading here about the UBS situation and Igor Olenicoff. In 2006 tax investigators found that he had 11,000 houses and a large collection of high-grade offices, but they gave him less than 30 seconds to make his mind up about whether or not he'd become a whistleblower and let the cards come down.
It strikes me as a case where it's in front of your face, and a lot of people are involved, and a lot of people know, yet it took literally years to make even the progress they have made.
I wonder why it is that within our culture, where it's in the best public interest to reasonably address the tax evasion issue, we cannot see what's in front of our face. I'm wondering whether or not the jurisdictions.... For instance the Canada Revenue Agency has estimates on the underground economy and other things, but we very rarely see any progress in terms of breaking down some of these. We cannot be isolated and immune from participating in this stuff.
The example of UBS is an extraordinary one, but there are a lot of people who are culpable and complicit in what's going on, and that includes people within banks, within law firms, within accounting firms, within consulting firms. Yet there seems to be acquiescence on the part of government and on the part of OECD not to be aggressive. It seems this is why we haven't dealt with the problem.
What's wrong with my hypothesis?