本帖最后由 万得福 于 2014-9-18 10:28 编辑
Eritrea is one of only two countries in the entire world that taxes its nonresident citizens on their global income. Specifically, Eritrea levies a flat 2% tax on the income of its citizens who reside abroad.
Nearly every other country in the world bases its tax system on residency rather than citizenship. For example, if you’re an Italian citizen and leave Italy to become a resident of and earn income in Dubai, you would not have to pay taxes on that income to the Italian government. If you were an Eritrean citizen, on the other hand, you would have to pay taxes to the Eritrean government no matter where you live and work.
This practice has been condemned as “extortion” and a “repressive” measure by an “authoritarian” government by the media.
In fact, even the UN has weighed in. In Resolution 2023, the UN Security Council condemned Eritrea for “using extortion, threats of violence, fraud and other illicit means to collect taxes outside of Eritrea from its nationals.”
You may be thinking, “What’s the controversy? Eritrea is getting criticized, and rightly so.”
To understand the controversy, we have to examine the only other country on the planet that has a similar tax system.
The only other country to tax its nonresident citizens globally is of course the US.
The US essentially does exactly the same thing as Eritrea to its nonresident citizens, except that it’s done on a much bigger scale and with absolutely draconian penalties.
Eritrea’s paltry 2% tax is a mere fraction of the top 39.6% federal tax rate that expat Americans have to pay—even if they earned that income abroad and never set foot in the US. (The US does allow for an exemption of a limited amount of foreign earned income, if strict requirements are met.)
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发表于 2014-9-18 10:27:30
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发表于 2014-9-18 12:57:30
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