0 the reduction, by legal methods, of the amount of tax that a person or company pays
1 a legal way of reducing the amount of tax a person or company would normally pay:
The most commonly recognised are tax evasion, tax avoidance and tax arrears.
Large companies reduce liabilities, generally in the income tax category, by relying on sophisticated tax avoidance procedures.
Over the years, they have scrutinised regulatory practices in such diverse areas as coal-mine safety, corporate crime, nursing-home regulation, and tax avoidance and evasion.
But what we don't know is the extent to which high-income people also reduce their taxable income by perfectly legal tax avoidance strategies that defer income in a tax-favored way.
But the former was always an elusive goal, because countering tax avoidance was a continuing struggle of often great technical complexity, rather than a once-and-for-all exercise.
Tax avoidance and evasion is widely practised and there is a strong cross-border dimension to it.
In neither case was this advice sought for tax avoidance purposes.
I shall address the serious matter of tax avoidance and offshore trusts.
