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Apple must pay 13B euros in back taxes, EU's top court rules

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Re: Apple must pay 13B euros in back taxes, EU's top court rules

#641

Post by lm28469 »

piltdownman wrote: post #636
lm28469 wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://observer.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/07/unna... https://www.politico.eu/article/ireland-gdp-growth-multinati... The country is a tax vessel, nothing more, remove the megacorps offices with barely any local businesses as well as the plane registrations and they drop right back somewhere bellow the average gdp per capita of europe. Ireland economy is 85% services, compare that to Germany's 68%

Germany has the Rhine and is the centre of the continent, and also has the Marshall Plan boost post 1950 for their infrastructural development. Ireland is an Island whose population only hit pre-famine levels in the last 3 years. Of course our economy is going to skew heavier service based! How are you going to ship cars and heavy industrial goods from Ireland to the rest of the EU and compete with Germany or France…

If you can't be intellectually honest and accept that Ireland would be a fraction of what it is without its tax evasion system idk what to say, there is literally not a single source that will tell you otherwise, even their own official reports mention that it is the case.

When 25% of your GDP comes for a single foreign company with 6000 employees in your country it's time to raise an eyebrow, especially when the facility's job is to assemble "made to order" computers (like the dude at the corner of my street).

> The "multinational tax schemes" used by some of these multinational firms contribute to a distortion in Ireland's economic statistics; including GNI, GNP and GDP

> A particularly dramatic growth in Ireland's 2015 GDP (from 1% in 2013, to 8% in 2014, to 25% in 2015) was shown to be largely driven by Apple restructuring their double Irish subsidiary

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple%27s_EU_tax_dispute#

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Republic_of_Ire...

Re: Apple must pay 13B euros in back taxes, EU's top court rules

#642

Post by a2128 »

chubs wrote: post #588

Can Apple simply exit Ireland effective immediately and claim they paid their taxes, and do not wish to be around for this new rule?

Since the ruling has already been made I doubt they can avoid it other than by exiting the EU market altogether. The result of exiting EU would be Apple's competitors becoming more dominant, decreased sales from loss of an entire market, and reputational damage from quitting over a petty tax dispute.

Re: Apple must pay 13B euros in back taxes, EU's top court rules

#643

Post by Silhouette »

kergonath wrote: post #624
Silhouette wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ignorance of the law is not an excuse. That argument is quite a stretch when the EU tends to pass relatively ambiguous legislation and leave interpretation relatively open compared to for example the legal framework in the US, when it was not some random law firm but literally the relevant national government that gave Apple the OK, and when that situation was widely known and apparently accepted for about 30 years b…

> That argument is quite a stretch when the EU tends to pass relatively ambiguous legislation and leave interpretation relatively open compared to for example the legal framework in the US, when it was not some random law firm but literally the relevant national government that gave Apple the OK, and when that situation was widely known and apparently accepted for about 30 years before the EU intervened. That is beca…

That is because the EU is not responsible for the member-states’ national laws, so they leave some room for different implementations. It’s on purpose.

That's not quite how it works. The EU makes binding legislation in three different forms. Regulations - such as the GDPR - apply directly in all member states. Directives are the indirect ones that establish a principle but require member states to implement their own laws to give direct effect to that principle. Finally there are decisions, which are binding on a specific party such as a company or member state.

You can read more about the different types of EU legislation at https://european-union.europa.eu/institutions-law-budget/law....

But the decision in this particular case wasn't (directly) any of those things. It was a ruling by the ECJ in a case brought by the Commission.

What is relevant is Irish law, which is clear and unambiguous. What was misleading was the behaviour of the Irish government.

But this is the problem. Tax systems are always complicated and open to interpretation in numerous ways. Large businesses are always required to make judgements about what they need to do to be in compliance with all of the relevant rules and always take advice from experts on these matters. What this action by the EU means is that businesses - including properly run businesses that have no intent to cheat anyone of anything - can no longer trust that following advice even from what should be the most authoritative sources they can ask will be sufficient.

They are not moving the goalposts.

The arrangements this legal saga has been about ran from the early 1990s for more than 20 years.

The EU started the legal action in 2016 when those arrangements had already ceased anyway and has spent about 8 years chasing it through the various courts and processes to reach this point.

If the IRS went after someone's tax filings from a year or two ago because they hadn't paid the correct tax that would be one thing. This is more like the IRS going after someone's tax filings from 30 years ago after allowing the arrangements to continue unchallenged with its full knowledge for a further 20 years and knowing that the the individual had already paid tax to another tax authority during that period instead because they weren't paying it to the IRS.

Except it's not really like that either because in this case it looks like it was the equivalent of the IRS that gave its blessing to the arrangements in the first place. So it's more analogous to some hypothetical higher authority coming along over 20 years after the fact and declaring that there was an error in someone's taxes that had been reported according to an agreement with the federal government and accepted by the IRS.

Re: Apple must pay 13B euros in back taxes, EU's top court rules

#644

Post by RHSeeger »

stale2002 wrote: post #571
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with all of this is that it's all sneaky schemes. You probably have something in mind for how a government is supposed to spend tax revenues. Assistance for the poor or something like that. But as a sovereign state they get to decide for themselves. Except that as soon as you admit this there is no point in having any kind of minimum rate etc., because there are a thousand ways for the state to return the…

> But as a sovereign state they get to decide for themselves. Not really no. The results of the court case prove that. > There is no real way to prevent this kind of thing Well. No way, except for through the result of an EU court case that just ruled that the tax scheme wasn't allowed. > Apple would Woulda coulda shoulda. The real question is "did they"? And the answer is no. They didn't do these other schemes, and…

> > But as a sovereign state they get to decide for themselves.

> Not really no. The results of the court case prove that.

To be fair, none of the states that are part of the EU _are_ sovereign states, because there is a high authority over them. Admittedly, that's debatable, because they can choose to leave the EU (as was seen by Brexit), but unless they do, they're not in complete control.

Re: Apple must pay 13B euros in back taxes, EU's top court rules

#645

Post by Silhouette »

noirbot wrote: post #543
Silhouette wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ignorance of the law is not an excuse. That argument is quite a stretch when the EU tends to pass relatively ambiguous legislation and leave interpretation relatively open compared to for example the legal framework in the US, when it was not some random law firm but literally the relevant national government that gave Apple the OK, and when that situation was widely known and apparently accepted for about 30 years b…

The other thing that worries me here is the EU's seeming willingness to both not intervene quickly and not provide ways for companies to know for sure that they're on the right side of EU laws until they do or don't get sued.

Creating an ambiguous business environment is unfortunately a recurring pattern with the EU.

A few years ago we had some fierce debates on HN about EU measures like the GDPR. Some claimed the regulations were excellent and compliance was easy if you weren't doing anything wrong. Some were more cautious and thought the length and frequent ambiguity of the regulations meant it couldn't be that simple. The strident defenders of the GDPR as lightweight regulation that should cause no significant costs or problems for honest businesses might like to read Mario Draghi's assessment of it from his report this week.

Re: Apple must pay 13B euros in back taxes, EU's top court rules

#646

Post by sgerenser »

sparrc wrote: post #536
cpill wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's not, but it's not the general case and also you realise this is the very opposite of the US: you get taxed when overseas (unless your a large corporation) and then get no benefits when returning because that would be communism.

That's a bit of an exaggeration, social security (state pension) and medicare (state healthcare for retirees) are not perfect but they're not terrible either.

If you were outside the U.S. for most of your working life, it’s unlikely you’d qualify for social security (requires 10 years of work paying into it).

Re: Apple must pay 13B euros in back taxes, EU's top court rules

#647

Post by etiennebausson »

chii wrote: post #560
jacobgkau wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can spout off "my way or the highway" as long as you think US citizenship is valuable enough that people are going to put up with it. People not expatriating is obviously the desired outcome of those rules, and the alternative is people renouncing their US citizenship (which is becoming more reasonable as the US passport gets weaker, among other factors). You're missing part of the point, though. Almost no other…

> The US government provides among the lowest level of services for its citizens out of any first-world government, so there's no reason it needs to be that much more strict. they provide you the world's premier military! That costs a pretty penny.

That's a 'service' provided by the government only if you are an oil baron.

Re: Apple must pay 13B euros in back taxes, EU's top court rules

#648

Post by TMWNN »

stiray wrote: post #559
Aerroon wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The welfare systems (in Europe at least) don't work. They work if you're old right now, but once the young people of today become old they won't get anything meaningful out of it. At least that's the impression I have and everyone else my age has. And healthcare is unavailable anyway. Several month long waits to see a specialist.

Here you have tons of USA citizens living in EU (and around the world) and ask them for first hand expirience on alternative. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1yT8swtVvg Dont miss part 2, part 3,... and skip non health care related, you might not want to hear them. And anyway, believe me that everyone rather waits in line (which is not really the case, if you are an urgent case, you trough the line), that not even go…

>Here you have tons of USA citizens living in EU

And yet, the only country in the world with more Americans living in it than the other way around is Australia.[1] Revealed preferences expose the truth that no number of videos with cherry-picked participants do not.

[1] That's on an absolute basis. Since the US has 20 times as many people as Australia, the odds an Australian will move to the US is still far higher than the odds an American will move to Australia.

Re: Apple must pay 13B euros in back taxes, EU's top court rules

#649

Post by noirbot »

Silhouette wrote: post #645
noirbot wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other thing that worries me here is the EU's seeming willingness to both not intervene quickly and not provide ways for companies to know for sure that they're on the right side of EU laws until they do or don't get sued.

Creating an ambiguous business environment is unfortunately a recurring pattern with the EU. A few years ago we had some fierce debates on HN about EU measures like the GDPR. Some claimed the regulations were excellent and compliance was easy if you weren't doing anything wrong. Some were more cautious and thought the length and frequent ambiguity of the regulations meant it couldn't be that simple. The strident defe…

And much the same with Apple and the DMA most recently. Do I think Apple is being a bad actor re: the DMA? Yes. But it does also seem like the EU is doing a lot of "Well, just release your product and we'll tell you after you ship it if we're going to fine you for billions of dollars". You see this with things like the upcoming iPhone Display Mirroring features that aren't coming to the EU where Apple has said they're not shipping them in the EU because they think it would violate the DMA, and the regulators have just blasted Apple for withholding features but explicitly not said whether the feature is compliant.

Having companies afraid of massive penalties if they mess up is fine and good, but only works if the conduct you're trying to disincentivize is one you're ok with them not doing at all.

Re: Apple must pay 13B euros in back taxes, EU's top court rules

#650

Post by robertlagrant »

Y-bar wrote: post #75
robertlagrant wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the EU specifically set up to allow competition between states on tax grounds?

Yes. The problem was not about the tax level, nor the inter-state competition. The problem was that it was _not_ a free and fair competition. The tax deal was not offered to all companies. Ireland secretly did this to only select companies, and it therefore crossed the threshold into [secret and illegal] state aid.

Ah I see. Yeah, that doesn't sound right. Thanks.
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