Legal Tax Evasion
Auction.
A method of sale in which the price of an item is never fixed in advance, and the highest bidder among those present walks away with it.
"One thousand dollars!"
"Two thousand dollars!"
"Five thousand dollars!"
Competition was underway in the hall. At a glance, it looked like the real thing. But the longer you watched, the more a different thought took shape—enough that even a thoroughly drunk Sora could sense it.
"Hey."
"Are you out of your mind?"
"I've been watching, you know?"
"You're having fun."
At a mere 0.05 percent alcohol, she was already completely plastered. Her cheeks were flushed crimson as she wandered around in a giddy haze.
Still, looks like she's got a scrap of sense left in that head of hers.
The auction taking place here appeared, on the surface, to be perfectly fine. Everything was being conducted within the bounds of common sense. There were buyers, and there were sellers.
"Ten thousand!"
"Fifteen thousand!"
"Twenty-seven thousand!"
"Yes! Twenty-seven thousand dollars. We've hit the seller's reserve of twenty-seven thousand. Anyone else care to bid~?"
A sense of wrongness. The fact that she'd picked up on it at all meant her eye for detail wasn't completely hopeless.
"It landed exactly on the reserve price. How does that even happen?"
"That's not the only thing."
"?"
"Look at who's raising their hands."
She still had a long way to go. This was almost certainly her first time at an auction, so it was only natural she wouldn't know the ropes.
Normally, the first thing you do is size up the competition.
In an auction, the price isn't fixed. With a little luck, you can walk away with something far below market value. And to control that luck, you need to identify, in advance, which participants are likely to become your rivals.
"Thirty thousand!"
"Fifty thousand!"
"One hundred thousand!"
"One hundred thousand dollars! We've hit the seller's reserve of one hundred thousand. Anyone else care to bid~?"
Among the people who show up to auctions, the truly wealthy are always a minority. Among professionals, that was common knowledge.
There's none of that atmosphere here.
You couldn't find the characteristic war of nerves that defined a real auction floor. People folded as coolly as if they'd agreed on it beforehand. No—most of them never raised a hand at all. In a hall with well over a hundred people gathered.
"There aren't even five people raising their hands?"
"Exactly."
"And it's the same people over and over……. Hic!"
She seemed to have sobered up a little. That was also why this cruise ship operated on a membership system.
The underworld.
People with a great deal of money sometimes needed things done that weren't entirely above board.
"Yes, the next lot is……."
My turn arrived. The tuxedoed auctioneer glanced subtly in my direction.
"We'll start at ten thousand dollars. The seller's reserve on this piece is fifty thousand!"
"Ten thousand dollars!"
"Twenty thousand dollars!"
And the show began. The handful of participants Sora had pointed out steadily drove the bids higher. It looked, for all the world, like a perfectly ordinary auction—if you didn't know they were nothing more than shills.
The people who know, know.
It was all designed to look like a legitimate auction. Sora still hadn't grasped the situation.
"Ah!"
"Raise your hand. Now."
"That hurts. Raise my hand for what?"
I gave her chest a firm, waking squeeze. Firm and springy—plenty of fun to play with.
I've got to hand this off somehow, don't I?
The piece currently on the block was something I had purchased for a billion won. I was about to sell it for a mere fifty thousand dollars—a discount of roughly ninety-five percent.
"???"
"What are you waiting for?"
"I told you that hurts! Fifty thousand dollars!"
I pinched her nipple, and only then did she snap to attention. The amount matching the seller's reserve was called out.
That's the system.
Variations on the same performance repeated themselves. After the auction ended, we went to collect the winning lot.
"Yoon Sora—Ms. Yoon Sora, is that correct?"
"Ah, yes……."
"Congratulations on your winning bid! Here is your item!"
It was a multinational vessel. The staff were foreigners. A flustered Sora stammered and fumbled as she accepted a cloth-wrapped frame.
Handle it carefully.
It was a painting worth a full billion won. In the end, she'd acquired it for the bargain-basement price of fifty million won.
"What on earth is going on?"
"Looks like the alcohol's wearing off."
"Of course it is. You kept groping me like that."
The remaining balance had been paid in chest. A magnificent pair of tits, well worth the price.
That's a joke, of course.
At first glance, the whole thing looked pointless. What was the point of any of this? If you had to draw a comparison, it was closest to money laundering.
"Money laundering?!"
"You don't know what that is?"
"No, I know—it's just…… that's a bad thing."
"Dropping the formal speech already, I see."
Or tax evasion. It certainly wasn't a good deed. There was no room for excuses.
I'm just teaching her that this sort of thing exists.
Making money is hard. Keeping it is harder still. Taxes, in particular, are a nightmare.
I flicked the cloth off the frame. An abstract work by a living Korean artist.
"So what does that have to do with anything?"
"It's a living artist."
"?"
"You don't know the tax code."
Contemporary art. Like Bitcoin, it was essentially meaningless. No one could explain why any particular price had been assigned to it. There was one critical difference, though. Contemporary art had a reason to exist: it was optimized for tax evasion.
"???"
"Works by living artists can be sold without paying capital gains tax."
"There's a rule like that?"
"There is."
It was almost certainly a policy meant to promote the art industry. But there were people who exploited it, and an entire market had formed around that exploitation.
That's how art works, isn't it?
To the eye of someone who understands art, a piece can hold astronomical value. To someone who doesn't? It's little more than a scribble. Contemporary art leans even harder in that direction. If you fail to recognize that a given work belongs to a particular artist—
"—there's nothing strange about it changing hands at a much lower price."
"Ah."
"Starting to get it?"
That was what this space was for. Borrowing the system of an art auction to transfer one's money to someone else. The winning bidder could turn around and resell the piece. Capital gains tax of zero made it possible.
From the perspective of the wealthy—
They hated paying taxes. It wasn't a matter of a few dollars here and there. On amounts over a billion won, the rate was twenty percent. Above three billion, it climbed to a murderous fifty percent.
"Th-that much?"
"Yes. That billion-won check I gave you was, by rights, destined for the same fate."
The destiny.
Plenty of people envied the rich, but a wealthy life wasn't exactly overflowing with ease either.
Let's be blunt.
No one would take kindly to having tens of percent of money they'd earned through blood and sweat skimmed off the top. Korea was especially filthy about it—second highest in the OECD after Japan. A fifty-percent rate was absurd even by global standards.
"In plain terms, your fortune gets cut in half."
"Insane."
"Right? The curses just come out on their own, don't they?"
If you're rich, shouldn't you just pay more tax? It wasn't a matter that simple.
If you try to squeeze the wealthy too hard—
The wealthy leave. They can evade taxes any number of other ways. These are people with the capacity to work every angle imaginable. Underestimating them is a mistake.
"Isn't that just a tax evader's excuse?"
"Well, that's one way of looking at it."
Art was one of those methods. Unlike Bitcoin, it was an asset that at least had one useful corner to it.
People in the art world might clutch their necks and collapse, but—
That was the purpose of the primary consumer base. Among the rich, those who truly loved art were rare.
The billion won I had handed to Sora. Done the legitimate way, two hundred million-plus would have gone straight to taxes. Beyond that, a host of other complications kicked in. Move large sums of money and the National Tax Service becomes extremely bothersome.
"Use art like this, and you cut the tax bill while also drawing less attention from the tax office."
"Eeeh."
"That's why contemporary art exists."
"I feel like I've learned something I wasn't supposed to know."
Become a VVIP and you could shave it down even further. Plenty of other methods existed as well.
Tax evasion is complex enough to qualify as an academic discipline in its own right.
It was also why accountants—a profession that, by rights, shouldn't need to exist, one that ought to have vanished with the Fourth Industrial Revolution—were still in such high demand.
"Still, we save on taxes."
"Mm."
"This is going to be an interesting trip."
An investor needed to understand the reverse side of things, not just the face. Only then could you truly understand the subject at hand.
Why does the price go up?
Simply wondering got you nowhere. Sora had begun to internalize an investor's way of thinking. You could say she had grown up a little.
"But."
"Hm?"
"Is this really the only reason we came on this trip?"
Body and mind both. Whether it was the rising blood alcohol or something else, she was getting bold. A shy little smile in her eyes. She linked her arm through mine and pressed in close, squeezing against me with those full breasts.
Mr. Pin Scordelou's theory wasn't exactly about this, but—
Alcohol certainly put you in a high mood. It looked like this was going to be a more enjoyable trip than expected.
Caw! Caw!
Okinawa. We arrived at the Japanese travel destination. Coming by ship meant you got to see the seagulls, which was always nice.
"Does that ship only run between Korea and Okinawa?"
"No. Worldwide."
"Ooh."
"People who want to evade taxes exist in every country on earth."
A short trip. We didn't have the time to go somewhere far. But if it was too close—
—there was no point in leaving Korea.
In that sense, it was ideal. Okinawa: a place you went to constantly, and yet somehow not quite Japan. Palm trees lined the streets in abundance. The exotic scenery set the heart racing.
"Alright, alright—Japan Tour group, please line up over here. Line up!"
"Yes~!"
"Why's the guide in such a rush~?"
A place well suited to stepping out of line. Though there was one minor problem.
Plenty of Koreans come to Okinawa too.
Someone might recognize her. She'd been fretting over that ever since we got off the ship. She'd pulled her hat down low. Given the reach of Dream Girls, it was understandable enough.
"I told you to walk around with your head held high."
"You've never been on TV, so you don't get it."
"And how are you supposed to get over the trauma like that?"
"Ugh."
I was going to make Sora shed another layer.