This is a very good read and it lead me to think about this somewhat differently.
The whistleblower is making the case that if Vanguard had kept all the profits then there would have been a $34B tax bill. But that's an assumption. It's far more likely that Vanguard would have paid out the extra money as a dividend so that there was no profit. Or they figure out some way to pay it out as extra shares in the investments, perhaps there is some way to make it be like unrealized gains so that there is no tax event until you take it out.
Can anyone who has some background shoot holes in the thoughts above?
To me this case looks shaky but I'm not a lawyer, tax guy, or even much of an investor (I do have money at Vanguard for whatever that is worth).
Dividends are paid from after-tax earnings, so they can't get out of corporate income taxes that way. As the article said, they could give most of the profits back to the fund owners as dividends, but the government would still get getting more tax revenue from Vanguard than before.
The whistleblower is making the case that if Vanguard had kept all the profits then there would have been a $34B tax bill. But that's an assumption. It's far more likely that Vanguard would have paid out the extra money as a dividend so that there was no profit. Or they figure out some way to pay it out as extra shares in the investments, perhaps there is some way to make it be like unrealized gains so that there is no tax event until you take it out.
Can anyone who has some background shoot holes in the thoughts above?
To me this case looks shaky but I'm not a lawyer, tax guy, or even much of an investor (I do have money at Vanguard for whatever that is worth).