The What:

Membercorp taxes are coming. Digest that a bit. No, you are not renters. No you will not have some high tax. The Tax rate will be 5%. Not 5% of the take, effective 5% tax rates. This is how we already do alt corp taxes except at far higher rates. This is a low rate but that low rate across all membercorps adds up to a lot. This is especially true of Karmafleet who have prodigious ratting and high taxation. As an example, this would take 1/4th of their ratting taxes today. This tax rate would take effect January 1st, 2016. This would mean first payments would not be due until February. Goonwaffe has paid in 15% for years now and will continue to do so. Oh dear, Goons are renters?



The Why:

One of the immutable laws of EVE is that things change. Adapting to that change is one of the reasons we have been so successful over the years. Generally, my specialty is predicting the meta and obviously it helps if you have thousands of people to help you make the meta. However, predicting the possible branches of the meta tree is crucial to adapting first and adapting best. This brings us to taxation. For several years now we have been diversifying our income streams. This is part of a much larger grand empire plan but it has helped show the possible paths forward with regards to some changes CCP is telegraphing.  The major thing that we believe is coming is that moongoo will shift from a top down, alliance level income stream, to a bottom up individual member stream with taxation.



We generally like a certain level of entitlements for the line member and more generous ones for the heavy lifters. SRP, caches, free fuel, plexes for fc, plexes for logi etc. I have said before we like to keep income and expense roughly balanced with a certain cushion for welps. Strictly speaking our wealth is greater now than it has ever been. However, we could see deficit spending a couple patches after Citadels. This is to stay in the black monthly and prepare a small cushion ahead of time without touching our reserves.



The moongoo supply shift means the alliance would no longer receive essentially 100% of the moongoo's value. It is highly likely we drop to 20% of the income stream that moongoo provides today. Luckily, we have been preparing for this so long that moongoo represents less than 1/3rd of our overall income. This has been falling as a percentage for over a year. There are many factors that are causing this and PCU is probably the largest. CCP balanced for a game that had bottlenecks that were substantially higher than needed today. Even if they hadn't we would not have wanted moongoo as a large percentage of income given the direction of EVE. We eventually would have enacted this plan simply due to demographic shifts within the alliance. Goonwaffe proper had been supplying 100% of tax revenue for years now. As our percentage of the whole is reduced due to growth so too does our % of tax revenue being able to cover SRP on its own.  Think of it like a single parent with another 10 kids. Eventually kids start losing college funding.



The How:

Taxation will be done inside the same RC system that handles altcorps and renters. We had a slight snag when the renters were deployed. The tax rate was hardcoded. So yeah, after gaining the ability to have multiple tax rates we are in a much better position to do this. Payments would go to DJs like any other. The vast majority of corporations have a tax rate much higher than this already. This means a portion of that revenue would instead go to alliance funding. There are a couple cases of semi large corporations having a tax shelter setup. This would impact them the most while other corporations would hardly notice.



Gory Details:

Some of you might like a peek behind the curtains on how we are thinking this plays out. Typically we cannot get into our thought process much since it is usually opsec or just something we aren't comfortable revealing at that point in time. This one though is more transparent. There is never a single reason we do things. Often not even just two or three reasons. This is also one of those cases but we can talk about a couple of the reasons at least.



First, CCP is likely to deploy what I call a "jizz array" or "goo spew". Think a moon miner except it spawns belts that are then taxed somehow on spawn or on use. We don't have a clear idea of what CCP is thinking around taxation but there are only a handful of possibilities. Our worry is they totally screw it up and tax in minerals instead of ISK. So if you assume someone has to mine the belt that also means that person is going to receive the lions share of the income per hour. So we will likely be able to tax somehow but probably not at anywhere near the efficiency as today. We actually like this model of EVE as we hate top down income streams. So this is a welcome change to EVE if too long coming.



Second, there are knock-on effects to moving goo to mining. None of those are remotely an issue we need to worry about right now. From a meta perspective we only need to focus on replacing the income stream of moongoo. Any knock-on effects from the CCP implementation will take a long time to play out. Those long term effects we have already planned and prepared for also.  As an individual I would recommend having at least one character capable of mining. This is a very short training timeline for an alt. Mining is going to be back on par with ratting unless CCP totally fubars the ratios or supply of goo. Hell, of course they will in the short term. Long term however this is easy to balance and easy to gather metrics on. We would expect rapid tuning if it was less than 75% of ratting ISK/hr. Mining scales far better than ratting. So it is unlikely it should have parity. However, as we well know, quantity is sometimes a quality. Great for density, great for community mining, great for people seeing prey. Generally adding any activity to the null-sec ecosystem is a good thing.



Q&A:

How do I register my corporation to my director, representative, me? This is in the usual RC app. Contact Ting Mei to get a link setup between your corp and your account. Corp CEOs should already have seen this app previously if not using it actively.