Originally by: Hakera

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Edited by: Hakera on 21/03/2005 08:52:08
I actually got emailed to ask about tax in the upcoming dev chat and I'll just give my own thoughts here. A tax system is rightly a complex thing because income/expenditure are equally complex. The first problem you face is defining:

what is income?

Now immediatly things start to get complex as you look at your own wallets and you will see some principle income:

Donations from players
Sales from market
Rewards from npc's

So then you define the problem of the next question is that really income? Lets have an example. Im a trader doing some simple trade, say a 100mill overhead which generates 10% profit. Now lets see what the wallet sees:

-100million
-500,000 market tax
+110million

The problem should be obvious from that; the tax system of greedy fatcat ceo sees the 110 million income and whack whatever tax on that. The problem is, it isnt income at all. Only 9.5million is actual income, but poor trader is going to get taxed on all 110mill because our model system isnt as complex or efficient at linking income and expediture from 'projects' and generating a linked net income.

Next scenario -- you have alts, you like the transfer isk between them, sadly player donations yet again - taxed because its an inflow into your wallet. Does a CEO really deserve a slice of that? Same for production - you buy minerals, a bpc and make a ship, your net income is 5mill per ship, but wallet sees a 55mill income.

In otherwords activities which 'churn' your wallet would be taxed to high hell and back.

Problem number 2: Income in Eve? is it always in isk?

answer, no, income is in the form of assets as well. Be it ore/minerals/loot you name it. So the amount a person is taxed does not take account of assets or activites which generate assets rather than isk. So a system based on isk would be skewed towards isk heavy activities whilst a person hording assets (who could then transfer them to alt not with corp tax to sell them).

Overall the result is, without an outright adequatly complex system, corp tax simply wont work. Its either too basic and unfair or too complex & to realistic code. I just dont think you will ever see corp tax Im afraid. Perhaps a role dependant player 'bill' might be more useful. One that strips a members roles if they dont stump up a flat fee.

Just my 2 cents.

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