Aviation friendly country - for a company

Not quite. Divis still facilitate NIC avoidance, which is the main point. You have to see the whole picture.

There are very special scenarios where one would base a real company in another country. One example might be the “notorious” Vodafone scheme where they located intellectual property rights to their frequencies in a country with special tax concessions. But almost no “real” business can do that sort of thing.

For a company owning an aircraft, probably the main consideration would be benefit in kind (and every modern European country will have an equivalent to that) but then you have to balance that against the other factors.

Peter wrote:

There are very special scenarios where one would base a real company in another country. One example might be the “notorious” Vodafone scheme where they located intellectual property rights to their frequencies in a country with special tax concessions. But almost no “real” business can do that sort of thing.

The infamous “Double Irish With A Dutch Sandwich”

Neil wrote:

Ireland looks pretty good to me.

It entirely depends on how much you earn.
Earn less than €20K pa, and Ireland is a pretty good place for personal taxes. You’ll pay nothing (or very close to nothing, depending on your personal circumstances).
Earn more than €33K and you’ll keep less than half of everything after that.

How your list differences between those two people, I’ve no idea. Our personal tax system is very progressive.

Neil wrote:

The infamous “Double Irish With A Dutch Sandwich”

That is no longer possible, and came about from abusing two reasonable systems.

It all comes down to companies residence.

In Ireland we don’t claim tax residence over companies that are incorporated here, but do not carry on any activity in Ireland and are not controlled from Ireland.

Most other countries claim tax residence over companies that are incorporated in that country.

This difference opened an opportunity for tax advisors.

We changed the rules about 2 years ago, that essentially says the same as before, but if an Irish incorporated company uses that so that it’s not resident anywhere, then we do claim its tax residence.

In the UK you pay zero tax at the 7k sort of area.

But also there are scenarios where you want to draw a salary (rather than a div) because it enables a 1:1 pension fund contribution. But then who needs a pension fund? The whole argument hangs on you being a lower rate taxpayer in retirement than when working. Nowadays they are not protected from anything (divorce is a dead common pension fund raider) except personal bankrupcy and then only if the contribs were done with funds not related to the bankrupcy, etc…

So this Q cannot be disposed of trivially.

I found a list of the “TAX FREEDOM DAY” for the EU. This represents the day on which you have paid your taxes for the year.

Which person does that table relate to?

Mooney_Driver wrote:

heaven help those who live in the taxation hells of the last group…

sincere thanks for your sympathy, from the bottom line

Peter wrote:

The problem is that the lowest taxes are normally found in countries which you may not want to live in, for various reasons

Here’s a link to the paper that the list came from.

http://www.institutmolinari.org/IMG/pdf/tax-burden-eu-2015.pdf

[ local copy ]

Well, there’s your answer then. The 8th page of the pdf (page number 7) shows how they calculate it.

For Ireland they work off a gross salary of just over €32Kpa. That’s just below the step change in income tax rates (they pretty much double after €33K).

So you’re doing fine (by international standards) if you’re under €33K, but not so good once you go over.
They say that they are using industrial average salaries, but this causes huge variations over the range of countries. So makes the “Tax free day” comparsion someone ambigious. They are comparing a 5K salary in Bulgaria to a 54K salary in Denmark and a whole range inbetween.

But if you’re thinking of moving country but keeping your income source, this sort of comparsion will be of little use to you.