The investors should be savvy enough to protect themselves. And protecting the taxpayers? What? The state is going to poke its head into every company and review your operations to make sure you'll be profitable enough to pay lots of taxes?
The investors should be savvy enough to protect themselves.
As others have pointed out, please remember what an extraordinarily weird thing the modern corporation is. In older conceptions of how to run a business, investors had the right to hold the directors personally liable for losses. Now, we have a system which largely removes that; in exchange for removing that check, others must be instituted, and a higher level of scrutiny (since a person who is not responsible for losses arguably has less incentive to avoid losses) is entirely appropriate. Since this privilege of freedom from liability is a creation of the state government, it is appropriate that the state government is actively involved in the oversight.
I am neither lawyer nor accountant so what do I know. I can believe that the various ways the sale of Instagram is structured and to whom can have huge tax differences. But I don't know.
