81–90 of 817 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If your accountant was structuring your finances so it appeared your income came from countries other than where you worked, then yes, he should probably be punished.
if something isn't right but is legal, it should be made illegal. you cannot prosecute abuse prior to the change.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dear Jacques (i'll stop with the game now ;) - I really emphatise with the social responsibility part of the story. The game Apple is playing with stored cash abroad is abject. Nobody is profiting from that. But we can agree that it's not the nature of a corporation to pay more taxes than necessary? If people offer you crazy deals: agree. Governments should coordinate not to make crazy offers and perhaps even tit-for…
Governments should coordinate not to make crazy offers and perhaps even tit-for-tat those that do. A preferable alternative would be for customers to consider a company's ethics in their purchasing decisions, and to encourage their peers to do the same. If it became socially unacceptable to have a new iPhone because of Apple's choice to pay such a trivial amount of tax (legal or otherwise, that's besides the point) y…
"Such “tax optimization” – albeit legal – is only possible because specialized law firms such as Appleby devise complex company structures inaccessible to most other firms" Maybe governments should simplify their own tax rules. Then you wouldn't need specialised law firms and simpler tax systems are harder to bypass. To add, there is nothing 'moral' about tax - you have no choice but to pay what you're legally obliga…
It's perverted that companies reach a point where it's more profitable to lobby or find ways around laws rather than continuing to spend on production or other business costs.
I mean do they not take advantage of that child exemption? Do they not deduce that mortgage? Those medical costs? That college tuition? Those business expenses? Do they decide to voluntarily add at least 1% to their income tax bracket?
Do they practice what they preach?
What annoys me the most is that, as a small company, I can't evade from my country tax system. I pay the taxes. All of them, at full rate. But there are these big companies which can afford to create offshore companies/holding just to evade some tax system, and lower their tax rate. So, what? The tax rate of a country is now "artificial", because it will never be applied to all revenues from all companies, because th…
Imagne there is subsidiary X & Y in jurisdiction. In jurisdiction A the parent company declares those two subsidiaries should be considered a single entity, in jurisdiction C the parent company declares they should be considered separate.
This allows intra-group loans between those two subsidiaries (and other subsidiaries outside jurisdiction C) to appear and disappear from the accounting as necessary for the purpose of tax avaoidance.
Whilst the declared company structures are perfectly legal in jurisdiction A and C the fact that the parent company has declared different corporate structure for the same entities is deeply suspicious as an activity.
As an Irish citizen, I feel embarrassed by the way we have dealt with Apple (and other behemoth corps). We simultaneously gave these organisations "free parking" and a "get out of jail free card". I don't blame Apple for taking advantage though. I would.
You can tell it's the large foreign corporations causing it, because of the big gap between the growth in domestic income and the headline GDP figure. However those companies still employ a lot of people and pay taxes Ireland otherwise wouldn't have.
Huge companies like: Mylan, Alkermes, Medtronic, Allergan, Johnson Controls, Accenture, Intel, Google, Apple, etc. would have likely not set up shop there if not for the tax policies. One can say, in response to that: fine, let them leave, we're better off -- except the Irish economy would get cut in half if you pushed them out by raising corporate taxes significantly, poverty would increase dramatically, unemployment would skyrocket.
Dear Herr Krach, thank you for your letter. I think you misunderstand how business works. Apple is a profit seeking corporation. Profits we make, we hope to distribute to our shareholders. Paying taxes is an obligation with which we comply, both to the letter and in spirit. We meet such obligations, but not nilly-willy. Our shareholders would not look kindly upon executives who pay more taxes than necessary. Avoidanc…
Dear Tim, You don't understand how shares work. Shareholders can only benefit from shares in two ways: through speculation about the share price or through dividends. I'm kind of disappointed that I'd have to explain to a man of your stature that money that Apple parks abroad will not benefit the shareholders except in the most indirect ways. If Apple brought home their overseas funds then it would benefit the US and…
I don't get why people think paying more taxes is "moral". There are a lot of things the government spends on that I don't agree with...and I'm sure I'm not alone on this.