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Paradise Papers: Dear Tim Cook

projekte.sueddeutsche.de

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Re: Paradise Papers: Dear Tim Cook

#121

Post by PhasmaFelis »

walshemj wrote: post #57
PhasmaFelis wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's maybe an interesting illustration here of the difference between morals ("do the right thing") and ethics ("follow the rules"). A lot of people like to emphasize that they've "acted ethically", knowing that people will misunderstand that as "I did the right thing" when they actually mean "I did everything I could technically get away with".

No ethics does not mean just following the rules The definition is "moral principles that govern a person's behaviour or the conducting of an activity" A LE person is not ethical because they follow the rules - to use a DnD Trope

That may be what you and I mean by it. I've been to enough corporate ethics seminars to know that when corporations talk about "ethics," they mean something much narrower.

Re: Paradise Papers: Dear Tim Cook

#122

Post by akanet »

styx31 wrote: post #80

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…

Well, it's more about familiarity with the system than work required to game them. I've met one-man operations paying effectively the same rate as Apple, they just know the legalese well enough to do it on their own.

Re: Paradise Papers: Dear Tim Cook

#123

Post by svennek »

auxym wrote: post #106
hackerguy99 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When it hits the fan, and you want to come back to the US for safety, unmolested, you'll be able to. Should that be free?

It is in Canada, Europe...

But don't forget that those are third-rate (more like fourth-rate) countries, almost undeveloped brutes...

(as an EU-citizen)

Re: Paradise Papers: Dear Tim Cook

#124

Post by Marazan »

jarym wrote: post #5

"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…

The tax rules were simple.

Multi-nationals create mass webs of offshore companies to move money round outside of their primary tax jurisdiction and then bring it back sans-taxiation if they had just done the simple straight forward thing.

Multinationals made the situation complex to get around simple tax rules. So the tax rules were expanded to try and keep up.

And thus it is a never ending race with ever increasing complexity of tax law.

Yet somehow I think you would bitterly oppose a move to principle based tax law (as opposed to rules based) which is the only way of actually simplifying tax law and putting all companies of an even level footing.

Re: Paradise Papers: Dear Tim Cook

#125

Post by WillReplyfFood »

cjsuk wrote: post #2

I think we can bitch all we like and nothing will happen. International taxation is complicated and part of a multinational's business model revolves around exploiting that for shareholder gain. What this points to is that we need a new global trade and taxation agreement for handling this. But the policy makers don't want that because they benefit from it. Ergo, it'll always be like this. At best you can add additio…

Your tone is very negative, but such is the subject you state the truth. There is no incentive to build a tax world government.

There seems to be a similar arrangement in the makings when it comes to trade agreements. If the EU showed one thing, its that you cant form a multinational entity by unifying trade laws alone.

Re: Paradise Papers: Dear Tim Cook

#126

Post by dontreact »

Maarten88 wrote: post #93
dontreact wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I no longer believe that it's possible for a single government to fix this. There is too much money in the game, the tax codes of multiple countries interact in too many complex ways, and I've already lived through multiple such tax loophole games being shut down by governments (most recently the double irish) only for new ones to crop up. I believe we will _never_ see change on this issue unless at least 1 large mul…

What if governments of large countries such as Germany (or the whole EU) would base the corporation tax simply on the total profit, divided by the revenue share of the country? For large public multinational corporations it is very easy to approximate how much they should pay in any country, when you just wouldn't accept the transfer pricing tricks that they use to move the profits around.

I think one reason this is tricky because it's not easy to define where an online sale is happening.

Re: Paradise Papers: Dear Tim Cook

#127

Post by fastball »

mindw0rk wrote: post #4

The point about Apple hiring best graduates who got their education mostly free of charge cause of all the tax payers really shift my mind about the whole tax-avoidance thing.

Yes but the moral burden is not on Apple, it's on those graduates. If you got your education for free and now you make a fat salary from Apple, it's your job to give back. Not Apple's.

Re: Paradise Papers: Dear Tim Cook

#128

Post by gt_ »

maxhallinan wrote: post #34
wjnc wrote: post #8

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…

I agree that companies are incentivized to pay the least amount of taxes just as they are incentivized to optimize their operating costs in general. I don't think that this letter denies that Apple has a rational reason for avoiding taxes. And I agree that this problem is best fixed by making tax avoidance structurally impossible. Pressuring market actors to voluntarily take actions they are not incentivized to take…

It didn’t need to stated publicly to anybody who understands that businesses (maybe most particularly modern corporations, shareholders and investment firms) act on strategies that they believe will make them the most money with the least risk. I’ve never seen anything change that, especially a blog post.

The same goes for when “Tim Cook frames Apple’s business practices as moral/ethical”. You call this marketing and Tim Cook does it everywhere he goes, Congress or not, all day, every day, because he makes a lot of money for it.

If this letter were run on the front page of NY Times, WaPo, Guardian every day for a week, I cannot imagine could make any discernable difference in the business practices.

Occupy Wall Street, which at least for the most part had it’s finger pointed in the right direction, made no measurable impact on, well, anything. We could speculate some long-shot correlations with fringe left political movements like Bernie Sanders but these things remain certain to be ineffective so long as this letter represents the public’s understanding of the problem.

Re: Paradise Papers: Dear Tim Cook

#129

Post by Ixio »

patrickaljord wrote: post #96
styx31 wrote: post #80

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…

Apple do pay their taxes just like you for everything they sell in the US. It's what they sell outside of the US that they don't pay, but they do pay in those other countries. The biggest unfair advantage they have against you is if you sell to overseas markets (you're paying US tax, not them) but if your market is US only then Apple isn't paying less than you are.

> It's what they sell outside of the US that they don't pay, but they do pay in those other countries.

Except they don't. The open letter says "What these filings also show is that since 2010, Apple’s foreign-earned income has been taxed at a rate of between 1 and 7 percent" however in Europe most countries have a corporate tax rate around 20% (cf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_rates_in_Europe).

For Germany it looks like Apple is paying at least ten times less taxes than it should.

Re: Paradise Papers: Dear Tim Cook

#130

Post by onan_barbarian »

bmomb wrote: post #108
sschueller wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same goes for US individuals living abroad not having any business relations or even holdings in the US. Yet they are required to file and pay US taxes in addition to local taxes.

But as an US citizen you still use some US benefits like the army and international protection, right? (I'm not from USA or currently living abroad but i think that is "fair")

This is incredibly stupid. A US citizen abroad gets very little additional protection from the "army and international protection" that the other citizens of the country in which they are generally resident get; i.e. a US citizen in Germany or Japan gets a lot and a US citizen resident in, say, China or Indonesia gets nothing. This is one of the dumbest arguments I have ever heard for this kind of wacky double taxation and I wonder at the persistence of its appearance.
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