Curiously, I can't find it neither in CNN business nor in CNN tech, at least on mobile.
Facebook tax court trial begins over Ireland offshore deal
131–140 of 333 posts
Re: Facebook tax court trial begins over Ireland offshore deal
#132Re: Facebook tax court trial begins over Ireland offshore deal
#133Surely this is more about political coercion than tax? Amongst all US companies that offshore profits, including the likes of Halliburton, Facebook has been singled out because the US administration wants the company to do it's bidding regarding policy and algorithms for political advertising? Especially considering all the other political reprisals and pardons that are in the news, following the impeachment acquitta…
> US administration wants the company to do it's bidding regarding policy and algorithms for political advertising?
Unfounded conspiracy theory?
Just because they haven't gone after other companies, doesn't mean they shouldn't go after Facebook. They might believe the other companies are guilty but don't have enough evidence to win the trial.
Facebook is clearly a US company. Founded and HQ'd in the US, so they should be paying US taxes.
Re: Facebook tax court trial begins over Ireland offshore deal
#134Zuck is being brought to heel before the election.
Really now? Social media played a large part in the election of the current regime, so why would they go after FB?
Why do you think it's the "current regime" that's going after FB? Before Barr, the "current regime" couldn't even launch investigations into fake "dossiers" and things of that nature, and this stuff with FB started back in 2016. Could be the deep state. Could, in fact, be both, competing with each other. Not being able to control public opinion is a pretty terrible thing for all of them. In the good old days you could resolve all this shit quietly by having a few conversations with the owners of the "free" press. Nowadays Zuck is less compliant.
Re: Facebook tax court trial begins over Ireland offshore deal
#135> "Facebook Ireland and Facebook’s other foreign affiliates - not Facebook US - led the high-risk, and ultimately successful, international effort to sell Facebook ads,” the company said in a pre-trial memorandum. This is hilarious! Does anyone really believe the pretense that these are multiple different companies?
I have hard time believing that selling Facebook ads is a high risk (at least from a financial standpoint, maybe from a democratic standpoint yes) effort. In 2010, Facebook had 500 million monthly users and there wasn't even any kind of a serious privacy legislation like GDPR to curtail Facebook's plan on monetizing user data. I can't imagine there were many executives at Facebook losing sleep over this.
Re: Facebook tax court trial begins over Ireland offshore deal
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
Making someone pay the taxes they owe is not a punishment.
I doubt facebook committed a crime here. The right way to address tax avoidance is to change the law, not to punish companies that comply with the law through arbitrary levels of complexity. Even if everyone in the room is aware that facebook is practicing avoidance, avoidance is still legal and categorically different than evasion. Now- The right way to figure out whether this was a crime seems to be by examining th…
Legal precedent is a portion of the law.
You -- or in this case, Facebook -- has one interpretation of what is legal, the enforcement agency has another. The court decides and everyone goes forward from there.
You and I can have opinion on whether these various international schemes are legal ways to avoid taxes, but ultimately the law going forward will be the precedent set by this case, and its appeals.
Re: Facebook tax court trial begins over Ireland offshore deal
#137People looking at their personal income tax return: Woah, this is more complicated than I expected - should probably pay a professional accountant to sort this out for me
People reading news articles like this: Look at these stupid professionals arguing about how international tax law in the $XB range when one side is so obviously wrong, and the correct outcome is really straight forward.
Re: Facebook tax court trial begins over Ireland offshore deal
#138Surely this is more about political coercion than tax? Amongst all US companies that offshore profits, including the likes of Halliburton, Facebook has been singled out because the US administration wants the company to do it's bidding regarding policy and algorithms for political advertising? Especially considering all the other political reprisals and pardons that are in the news, following the impeachment acquitta…
> US administration wants the company to do it's bidding regarding policy and algorithms for political advertising? Unfounded conspiracy theory? Just because they haven't gone after other companies, doesn't mean they shouldn't go after Facebook. They might believe the other companies are guilty but don't have enough evidence to win the trial. Facebook is clearly a US company. Founded and HQ'd in the US, so they shoul…
Facebook does pay US taxes. That is not in dispute. But facebook does business all over the world. The question is about the proper handling of overseas income. How much of that should face local tax rates vs US tax rates?
It's a complex area of tax accounting and there are a lot of judgement calls to be made. This lawsuit is about one of those judgement calls.
Re: Facebook tax court trial begins over Ireland offshore deal
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
Making someone pay the taxes they owe is not a punishment.
I doubt facebook committed a crime here. The right way to address tax avoidance is to change the law, not to punish companies that comply with the law through arbitrary levels of complexity. Even if everyone in the room is aware that facebook is practicing avoidance, avoidance is still legal and categorically different than evasion. Now- The right way to figure out whether this was a crime seems to be by examining th…
I think there's room to argue that intentionally shipping all your IP to a lower tax country then charging the main company (that developed that IP in the first place) high fees to use that IP as a way to shift profits from higher tax areas to lower tax areas could constitute fraud. Either they sold/transferred the IP for way to little or they're charging themselves way too much because it's advantageous for taxes.
Re: Facebook tax court trial begins over Ireland offshore deal
#140Facebook made $70B in 2019. This fine amounts to about 7 weeks of their time. During the time it takes for the trial / etc, they'll make enough money to pay the full fine. That's just revenue, obviously they'll have other expenses... but still, this isn't as large of a hit to them as $9B sounds.
The article doesn't have any figure on a possible fine.