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Apple has €13bn Irish tax bill overturned

bbc.com

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Re: Apple has €13bn Irish tax bill overturned

#131

Post by tweetle_beetle »

tjoff wrote: post #95
raxxorrax wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just compiled a list with companies paying more tax willingly: If companies were allowed to murder people, I would feel staunchly more endangered.... but seriously, Ireland has lash tax laws to lure these giants into their country, this is no secret, we have several countries within the EU engaging in similar strategies. I didn't say that the amount of taxes Apple pays isn't morally questionable. But you would stil…

Finding moral companies that doesn't do unethical things to avoid tax is not hard. I'd claim that the absolute vast majority don't.

So how would I go about determining whether a company I want to buy from doesn't do unethical things to avoid tax? It's everywhere and nowhere.

For larger companies it's just a cost/benefit exercise - there are professionals and an industry built around making and executing these decisions. If the rewards are large enough, they'll do it. How can I, as a consumer, work out if Apple is paying the correct tax on the app payment I make in the App Store?

But equally not all tax evasion is on the scale of Apple's. There is plenty going on at the other end of the spectrum. How can I, as a consumer, work out if my local window washers are paying the correct tax on their cash payments?

I would argue it's virtually impossible for a consumer to establish these facts. And that's the way it should be - we ought to be able to rely on specialist agencies to enforce the rules.

Re: Apple has €13bn Irish tax bill overturned

#132

Post by alphadevx »

karavelov wrote: post #51
stormdennis wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No tax was owed to the Irish people from Apple. It was European commisson overreach. [Edit: been this comment is oscillating between -1 and 1 like a yoyo.]

It is owned to EU people as the extracted profits from EU were transferred to Ireland and not taxed due to loop hole in Irish law

Well apparently not, according to the ruling being overturned today by the EU court. They are the legal facts.

Re: Apple has €13bn Irish tax bill overturned

#133

Post by linuxftw »

m12k wrote: post #20

Transfer pricing and tax havens are draining money out of the economies of most European countries, breaking the virtuous cycle where consumer spending also leads to salaries, taxes and more investment in the community, to keep the economy going - instead we have a shrinking middle class, as the fuel is drained from the engine. Ireland, Luxembourg and certain other countries are complicit in this. We clearly need bet…

> We clearly need better tax laws to combat this

Just lower your tax rate to match the most competitive jurisdictions, easy.

Re: Apple has €13bn Irish tax bill overturned

#134

Post by jojobas »

It doesn't seem to be an Irish tax bill, it's a EU tax bill which Ireland opposes.

One rather curious feature of this case is that if the ruling had gone the other way, and Ireland had been on the losing side, its "punishment" for breaching EU law would have been to receive a large amount of money: taxes the Commission said were owed by Apple.

Re: Apple has €13bn Irish tax bill overturned

#136

Post by negrit »

nodamage wrote: post #120
627467 wrote: post #114

> "This case was not about how much tax we pay, but where we are required to pay it," Apple said in a statement. We have come to accept that certain tax payers (ie. corporate or well lawyered individuals) can chose where their revenue should be taxed. It think it has become obvious that this freedom distorts the spirit of taxation in most (all?) countries. I think it is fair to prevent double taxation across countrie…

There's an argument to be made that since Apple is a US company, ultimately their revenue should be taxed in the US. And ultimately that is what happened: the money Apple made outside the US was eventually taxed when they repatriated it into the US. https://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-to-pay-38-billion-in-repa...

I'm pretty sure Apple has an entity in Europe therefor the money this entity makes in Europe should be taxed in Europe.

Re: Apple has €13bn Irish tax bill overturned

#137

Post by SahAssar »

alphadevx wrote: post #26
kasperni wrote: post #13

From the original finding: "The Commission's investigation concluded that Ireland granted illegal tax benefits to Apple, which enabled it to pay substantially less tax than other businesses over many years. In fact, this selective treatment allowed Apple to pay an effective corporate tax rate of 1 percent on its European profits in 2003 down to 0.005 percent in 2014." [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EU_illegal_…

Yes and that finding has just been overturned.

Are the facts in dispute or just the legality of them?

Re: Apple has €13bn Irish tax bill overturned

#138

Post by DeonPenny »

m12k wrote: post #20

Transfer pricing and tax havens are draining money out of the economies of most European countries, breaking the virtuous cycle where consumer spending also leads to salaries, taxes and more investment in the community, to keep the economy going - instead we have a shrinking middle class, as the fuel is drained from the engine. Ireland, Luxembourg and certain other countries are complicit in this. We clearly need bet…

Honestly at first glance this seems right. But this argument has been made so much, in so many place, and ended in failure so frequently why don't we think of something different. Hopefully less dependent on government evolvement. The idea that you can vote or tax this problem away seems misguided at a certain point.

Re: Apple has €13bn Irish tax bill overturned

#139

Post by netcan »

Some irish background:

About 30% of Irish GDP is "leprechaun economics." Funds that transfer through ireland without touching anything, and "would disappear if you tried to touch it." If you look up financial statistics that rely on gdp (eg oecd stuff), they're nonsensical.

This isn't a normal "bidding for jobs" situation.

We recently had an election that upended political norms. The two major parties (like US republicans and democrats) now have What tipped the balance was a "left wing wave." The largest party in this wave is Sinn Fein, a nationalist-republican party. Their campaign focused more on left wing issues than republican ones.

In any case, this whole leprechaun economics thing is rarely mentioned. Ostensibly, the political turn should have turned on leprechaun economics. Almost no one mentioned it though.

The benefit to Ireland isn't clear to me. Apple, Google, etc do have real operations here. They employ people and such. But, it's not clear how these relate to the tax evasion. I have never heard an explicit articulation or quantification of benefits.

Politically, I think people just assume that it's beneficial because it's sneaky. A weird expression in irish chitchat is "say nothin!" It's part of a whole dialect (or kant) of gestures & phrases to communicate collusion. It's a part of irish culture, and it plays here.

The upshot is that no one really understands why we have this system, but no one wants to give up the game by talking about it.

$13bn is a lot of money here, about $3-$4,00 per person. It's shocking how little political debate we have on this... not even from those who want to spend this money.

Re: Apple has €13bn Irish tax bill overturned

#140

Post by aosaigh »

Is there any concensus at all on how global corporations _should_ pay tax? These sort of cases illustrate how institutions think they _shouldn't_ handle tax, but it's not clear to me how we apply tax to a globalised economy? It's seems to be a hugely complex issue with many different stakeholders. Where is the nuanced discussion about these issues that falls somewhere between "Corps are evil" and "innovation is vital"?
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