You made the claim so it shouldn't be hard for you to show that Apple paid a 35% tax rate after all deductions and credits using verifiable numbers.....
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Nobel-Winning Economist Calls Apple's Irish Tax Arrangement 'Fraud'
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You made the claim so it shouldn't be hard for you to show that Apple paid a 35% tax rate after all deductions and credits using verifiable numbers.....
Apple is no Californian company. The company headquarter is there but Apple has many many international workers. The world isn't as US centric as you believe it is...
It's only fraud when governments around the world needs money. It was completely fine for decades.
Rubbish. When I buy an Apple product it still says Designed by Apple in California.
Because it is. There's a $5 billion spaceship being built in Cupertino to prove it. They make and design all their products in America, outsource what they can elsewhere, where cheaper, and sell to the rest of the world.
But it is still Designed by Apple in California.
Just seems weird that you need me to verify something that nobody is questioning.
Here is the 2015 10-K.
http://investor.apple.com/sec.cfm?DocType=Annual&ndq_keyword=
(in millions)
Operating income for Americas: 31,186
Current federal taxes: 11,730
So their tax rate on US Income was $37.6%.
Obama got a Nobel Peace, so those prizes are worthless.
Taxation is morally wrong, unless someone else is paying.
Apple is avoiding taxes legally.
If Ireland doesn't offer the best deal, another country will.
Next US president should lower taxes (as much as possible) and don't charge a dime to bring money from overseas.
Taxation is morally wrong, unless someone else is paying.
Apple is avoiding taxes legally.
If Ireland doesn't offer the best deal, another country will.
Next US president should lower taxes (as much as possible) and don't charge a dime to bring money from overseas.
Legal =/= Morality
How many Nobel Prizes do you have? Get one if it's so worthless, I dare you.
So in that alternate universe, who pays for your military and roads and bank bailouts and everything that screams out 'America!'?
Private sector made roads/railways, banks, security, communications and everything before government came to "help and regulate". Even the church helped the poor before wasteful benefits came.
Best thing government can do is get out of the way.
Unless, of course, you open a foreign corporation to handle your foreign business like Apple did. Nothing real nefarious here.
Does that make you a complete liar if you try to argue otherwise?
Do you still beat your significant other?
I cant believe this nonsense is still going on
I dont come up with some crazy scheme to not pay 30% to apple for everything we sell on the app store. That is the price of doing business there. 30% of revenue not even of profits!
Just like I know what are my NYC, NYS and fed tax rates... Again, the cost of doing business here. This is not a secret - apple knew what the USA taxes were. Change the law and have them pay up - I'm ok with negotiating a lower rate for the future (or amnesty for US companies in financial trouble) but they pay the old rate on profits up to this point.
Love how all these companies take advantage of our infrastructure to make billions - and later want to skip on The bill. If this country is so bad why are they not building their donut in Ireland
I dont come up with some crazy scheme to not pay 30% to apple for everything we sell on the app store. That is the price of doing business there. 30% of revenue not even of profits!
Just like I know what are my NYC, NYS and fed tax rates... Again, the cost of doing business here. This is not a secret - apple knew what the USA taxes were. Change the law and have them pay up - I'm ok with negotiating a lower rate for the future (or amnesty for US companies in financial trouble) but they pay the old rate on profits up to this point.
Love how all these companies take advantage of our infrastructure to make billions - and later want to skip on The bill. If this country is so bad why are they not building their donut in Ireland
Hmmm......I thought the whole point was to transfer the IP to an Irish subsidiary then licence it back to Apple US and take a Tax Deduction on the licencing fee?
I'm sure he's knowledgable but his "fraud" statement is a political one, not one of a legal standing.
He has a perspective that one can agree with or not. But that's all it is, his perspective. Read some of his papers. They're hot-linked at his name in the OP.
If the Bloomberg article accurately posted the interview, he should lose any credibility as an objective economist that he's been afforded. Then again, his papers should've been convincing enough beforehand.
I don't think so, Apple gets to include the Licensing fee in the cost of production per unit sold. Nations don't Tax the gross sales price of a unit, only the profit made off that unit. The Licensing fee, is a fee owed to Apple Ireland, it's not profit for Apple US. It is a cost to manufacture.
Okay, the issue isn't Ireland as such. It's just that nations like Ireland and Luxembourg have the lowest corporation tax rates around in order to facilitate this.
Apple subsidiaries in higher corporation tax nations pay bogus royalty fees to Apple subsidiaries in lower corporation tax nations in order to generate profits in countries where it will be taxed less.
It's not just Apple and it's not just Ireland, but the royalty fee is bogus and purely a mechanism to avoid paying taxes. Whether or not it's fraudulent is up for debate, but I definitely understand why a Noble Prize winning Economist may think so. It gets very difficult to put a stop to scams like this when business and politics are so closely linked. I doubt there are many regimes that would like to take on Apple/Google/Starbucks et al with the values of money at stake, but when a major nation does, the rest will follow suit.
I'm don't know where any of your info is coming from. How much is this license fee that you speak of?
To over-simplify the situation, Apple formed another corporation in Ireland (actually more than one). Let's call it Bob. All income from outside the Americas goes into Bob. The US can't tax that income until Apple chooses to take the income out of Bob.
The patent licensing just enables Bob to conduct business using Apple's IP.
Do you have an accountant? Do you file for any tax write offs? Do you want to pay less taxes and not more? Are you doing any or all of these things legally? If you answer YES then you are doing the same things that Apple does. Why don't you pay your fair share?
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This is just another form of the patent law debate. Apple plays by the rules of a broken or unjust system the same way most others do. They play the best and win the most so that makes them the biggest target.
Joseph Stiglitz, an economic professor at Columbia University and 2001 recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, has described Apple's tax arrangements in Ireland as "a fraud" in a recent interview with Bloomberg TV.Under current U.S. laws, Apple is able to shift billions of dollars in profits to Ireland, where it operates multiple subsidiaries, sheltering those earnings from up to a 35 percent corporate tax rate in the United States. Ireland has a much lower corporate tax rate of 12.5 percent, but Apple is believed to have a sweetheart deal with Ireland that sees it pay less than 2 percent in exchange for creating jobs in the country.
Apple has been the subject of a European Commission probe related to its Irish tax arrangements since June 2014, with the executive body investigating whether the deal constitutes illegal state aid. Ireland's finance minister Michael Noonan recently said he expects a decision to be reached by September or October, and Apple could owe more than $8 billion in back taxes depending on the outcome.
Apple insists it is the largest taxpayer in the world and that it pays every cent of tax it owes under current laws. In a late 2015 interview with 60 Minutes correspondent Charlie Rose, Apple CEO Tim Cook described tax avoidance accusations against the company as "political crap," adding that the United States has a tax code that is "awful for America" and "made for the industrial age."
Apple provided the following statement during its March 2016 meeting with the European Parliament's tax committee:Apple is only one of several multinational corporations that have been scrutinized for possible corporate tax avoidance in Europe over the past few years, with others including Amazon, Google, IKEA, and McDonald's. Last year, the European Commission ordered Starbucks and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles to each pay up to EUR30 million in back taxes, after ruling that the companies benefited from illegal tax deals.
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Article Link: Nobel-Winning Economist Calls Apple's Irish Tax Arrangement 'Fraud'
Ok, we're both kind of right, Apple can't write off IP licensed back to Apple US, however:
If you're gonna criticize Obama, at least learn to spell the name of the prize you despise. It'll make your post sound more informed.