171–180 of 436 posts
Given the stakes, unclear to me why multinationals don't find a way to create there own country, that would be free of any non-member decent.
Because other nations wouldn't recognise it.
What reasons would make you believe that?
Apple engage(ds) in aggressive tax planning - and they, along with FBK, Google, etc - deserve to be smacked down with a heavy bill. An effective tax rate of 0.005% - when your next door business neighbour is paying 20% - is morally wrong and damaging to society and the common good.
Morals are irrelevant in this story. Tax law is a system of rules. There should be no second arbitrary standard people (and companies) should be expected to follow.
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Not taxing someone is not the same as paying them! By that logic I am paid by the government every time I listen to Simply Red without them taxing me for the privilege? Why am I not rich then? Damn me, the linguistic backflips in this thread are amazing. Tax is the taking of something . Low taxes mean you take less , not that you are generously paying people!
> Not taxing someone is not the same as paying them! That is a terrible straw-man - no one ever claimed that in this thread. Additionally - your argument relies on word play: in practise, Walmart giving you a $10 bill after you buy a $100 item has the same effect as giving you a $10 discount on the item. When one corp (Apple) pays less taxes than others in the same jurisdiction (Ireland in this case), it is unfair -…
in practise, Walmart giving you a $10 bill after you buy a $100 item has the same effect as giving you a $10 discount on the item
I guess you meant a $90 discount? But regardless, the wordplay is on your side: if Walmart charge you $10 for an item then by definition that item costs $10. If they charge other people more, perhaps because they don't have a loyalty card, that doesn't mean they're giving you "aid" under any normal definition of the term as they're still charging you money. Aid would be if they gave away their products for free, or explicitly made a donation to some cause. Merely having differential pricing isn't "aid" for the same reason that an airline charging me less to fly economy isn't "aid", nor is it a discount.
What Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and most other big US company do is the so called "double Irish"[1]. Essentially is a clever way of using two quirks of some EU countries loopholes in tax laws, from treating IP licensing fees (of course the brand and intellectual IP is owned by a British virgin island tax haven, where else could this stuff be created/invented), and the net result is that Apple et al end up payi…
In 2014 Apple's effective tax rate was 0.005%. That is 5 cents for every $1000 in profits. Even a patent troll could do better than Ireland...
Why this blatant falsification of facts? In 2014, Apple's earnings before interest and taxes was $53,483,000 and the income tax expense was $13,973,000. That's 26.12% effective tax rate. All data from Yahoo! Finance: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AAPL/financials?p=AAPL . It's a similar tax rate in other years too.
Also the income statement says: All numbers in thousands
So you need to add 000 to the end of those numbers
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Lower taxes for specific companies is the issue though, not lower tax rates across the board.
Two questions: 1. How do they target these companies? 2. Is this the issue then? If it was for all the companies, with no exceptions, would that be allowed? I'm seriously asking in the hope to get a better understanding, because right now, the way I see it is: As long as they are not breaking any laws, it's their "right" to use any loophole there is, to minimize their taxes (or maximize their profit, depends how you…
Problem with this one is that they didn't and it wasn't a loophole. It was a well understood and by Ireland supported ignorance of existing treaties which have an effect of a law that just finally caught up with them.
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It is well understood that retroactive changes to the law are one of the worst things a legal system can do, which is why so many constitutions ban it and why other countries (like the UK) have a strong convention not to do it. The US Constitution bans them explicitly. Yes, of course countries routinely do bad things and ignore convention and constitutional principles, but that doesn't make it suddenly OK. The low ra…
You have missed the point - this is about different companies within one state being charged different rates of corporation tax, not different states across the EU charging different rates of tax. > if the EU successfully forces countries to pick a single corporation tax rate across the bloc The EU is forcing no such thing. It is forcing countries within the bloc to not give any one company special treatment. The dis…
If a country can't charge different tax rates to different companies based on their own arbitrary policies, then they have lost a significant component of their own sovereignty. If the EU wants its members to give up tax policy to Brussels then they should propose a treaty change and make corporation tax a competency of Brussels, then it can be the EU that decides which companies pay more or less tax according to their own political priorities. But they haven't done that and I bet they won't, because they know that they'd lose any such argument. Hence, the back door approach.
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Is it Apple's problem that Irish law disagrees with EC agreements? Yes. To the tune of €13bn. At the scale Apple operates their legal team should be considering whether the deals they negotiate are legal in all the applicable jurisdictions, not just the local one. The Irish government should also have done a better job, so part of the blame lies with them, but that doesn't free Apple of all responsibility. In any cas…
However, the nice thing about land taxation is that hiding the ownership doesn't matter: you can see from the land registry that it's owned by Shady Cayman LLC, but you don't care who they really are so long as you have a corresponding payment to the tax authorities. If they fail to pay that becomes a lien and ultimately reposession.
And then someone close the the Government leases back said land for 99-years with little to no actual "rent" money and you're back at step one of the problem.
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What actually happened between IE and AAPL is on the verge of extortion and bribery - the only difference is not on personal level but on Gov vs Bus. We should heavily penalise this, as AAPL literally stole money from both US and EU people. Because of this arrangement: Apple paid less taxes in US, hence US people have worse roads, healthcare etc. To the same in EU (but here by bad IE decision). Money taken is on AAPL…
Companies make deals with governments __all the time__ for tax breaks and government subsidies. Governments want jobs and investment, companies want the best deals they can get. This is NOT extortion or bribery, just everyday business. It happens every single day even between US states, not to mention nation-states. Business is competitive and that's a good thing. AAPL in this case has deferred taxes on profits with…
Giving a tax break to some specific kind of company (e.g plumbers or taxi companies) sounds dubious but doable.
To my ears this just sounds like the Irish government tried to "make a good deal" with Apple, but the law doesn't allow it. Which sounds obvious.
It feels like a clash of company and government culture: the US one where companies try to get "deals" from states in return for doing business there, and the European one where they can't.