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The IRS Hits Symantec with a $1 Billion Tax Bill
GnoWay writes "Macworld is reporting that the IRS has charged Symantec Corporation with about a 900 million dollar tax bill due to the charge that Symantec and Veritas (purchased by Symantec last year) under-reported the value of intellectual property which they had transferred to their two Irish subsidiaries. Another $100 million is connected to Symantec's 2003 and 2004 reports."
Norton Antivirus is small fries. The big money comes from Symantec's corporate antivirus.
Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
I'm sure that the IRS and the evil company that didn't pay their taxes will come to some agreement, and it will be way less than a billion dollars. Companies always find a way out of messes like this. Of course, it'd be neat if Symantec were to declare that they were bankrupt, and then reopen under the name Norton, without paying a dime... Only in America... :P
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Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
How do you VALUE intellectual property? Is it what someone ELSE might pay for it, or what you say it is worth?
If you go off of what someone ELSE might pay for it, then songs should be nearly free or much discounted vs what they are currently.
If you go by what you value it to be, then you can make the value arbitrary since you are the one who applies value to it right?
WTF? How do they make these determinations.
If you don't vote, you don't matter, so don't waste your time telling me your opinion
They will just release another major virus soon and rake in the cash to cover this settlement with the IRS, no problem.
So you want the government to Tip Toe (More) around public traded companies because of fear of shacking the stock prices. As a stock holder I would like to know if the companie I have stock in may have to pay a huge dept to someone else. Plus you also do realize stock prices rise and fall all day. I have seen cases where a company makes their exceeds their their projections are even higher. And still their stock gets hammered. Just remember Stock only is money when you sell it. Before that it is just the current value of of it. Once you buy stock your money is gone. When you sell it again then you get what it is worth at the time back.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Why not? With the ability to run Windows in a virtual machine or as part of a dual-boot on Intel Macs, even Mac users will need a antivirus program to practice "safe computing" while playing Minesweeper.
I used to work for veritas and got out shortly after the buyout. Veritas was a cool place to work. And when symantec took over, they sent out this 1/4" thick book full of management-speak. It was unreal. "What is winning?" "We believe in unity." "Our customers trust us to lead the way." After all of this, they listed the names of every employee from either company. Then they had a company-wide conference call with the new ceo. They had "questions from employees" dolled out by a pretty-sounding secretary type. One of the questions was "what can I do to be a better employee?" "You know, I'm being asked that all the time..." I nearly vomited. Ahead of their exit interview, they send you this questionaire to fill out planning to go ever it with you later. After I sent it back to them, they didn't want to have an exit interview anymore... something about how the ceo on the conference call sounded like a lord trying to placate the serfs. :-) I still have the book as a joke, and as a reminder of why, yet again, I've become a consultant and vow never again to be a wage-slave. I shudder to think about what it costs to print up 20,000 of these shiny black books. If they were trying to buy my loyalty with bull-shit management wrapped in a shiny package, they would have bought more loyalty by simply sending me a check for the printing cost of my little book.
I hear their stock has dropped by 1/3 since the buyout. I'm glad I didn't hang around for the stock options.
Disconnect your television. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. They're probably lying. Don't be a sheep.
Same way most people decide on the value of a physical object - some combination of how much it cost to produce it, the worth to the person in question, what they could sell it for, how much they're prepared to pay, and so on.
Just because it can be easily reproduced doesn't mean that it was free to create the first copy or that it has no resale value.
Gosh, that's like charging $750 for copying one song...
That's a punishment and a deterrent. When something illegal is easy to do, hard to detect and widely regarded as not really being that big a deal, the punishment tends to be on the harsh side, or even out of all proportion. It's meant to act as a deterrent, the idea being that if it's so easy, so unlikely that you'll get caught and doesn't seem to hurt anyone, a sledgehammer punishment is the only thing that will stop prospective transgressors.
I'm not saying that it's right, or just, but that's the theory behind it as I understand it.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
It will be tied up in Tax Court (where corporations appeal decisions like this) for years.
Fixed.
(we peons simply go to directly pound-me-in-the-ass-prison -- do not pass go, do not collect dropped soap)
Without the loopholes, the IRS tax guide would have exactly 3 pages: the front page, the tax formula, and the back page.
Not exactly. How do you define income? In other words, what is a business expense (I bought a widget for $15 and sold it for $25, so I made $10), and what isn't (I bought a widget for $15 and lunch for $5, then sold the widget for $25 - I still made $10)? What if I bought lunch to find widget buyers in the restaurant?
The whole concept of taxing income is flawed because income is abstract. It can be manipulated in multiple ways. It would be better to tax something tangible like property or sales - but that would lose politicians their power to play with the tax code to the benefit of their backers.
-- Support a free market in the field of government
Thanky you for insulting the millions of people who work honest jobs, have investments for the future to provide for their retirement and families, and contribute to the world every day. Good going.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
Just remember Stock only is money when you sell it. Before that it is just the current value of of it. Once you buy stock your money is gone. When you sell it again then you get what it is worth at the time back.
Just like a lottery ticket.
If you earned, you paid. The question is "Do you know how much you paid?"
If you answer "I didn't have to pay, I got money back" then therin lies the problem.
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
You may buy their products, but I certainly dont. You pay their bill, I will stick to something cheaper and better.
The phrase "more better" is acceptable English. suck it grammar Nazis
Golly, that FairTax thing is looking better everyday.
And yet the oil tycoons get away with a 8 billion dollar profit. Looks like Symantec need to get a few senators in their back pocket.
Ha. Don't even get me started on that. About half of my yearly property tax bill goes to what passes for education in this county. There's more than enough funds to educate students (including all the illegal ones) if it wasn't being misdirected to build private empires. Sorry ... the state of the educational system in this country is a bit of a sore point with me. I get fed up with schools crying "we're sorry your kids are ignorant fucks that can't get a job, but if you just give us even more of your hard-earned cash we're just so totally certain we can fix the problem." Phooey. Cut out the football and the basketball and plush offices and mahogany conference tables and the private secretaries with big salaries and bigger tits and spend some bucks on hiring *good* teachers and providing a good place to learn. Like most things run by the government, there's a Texas shitload of waste in the school system, but I see no way to remove the entrenched bureacracy.
... the tax burden in the past thirty years or so seems to have shifted from the corporate world to the middle class. I'm not sure how the IRS is valuing "intellectual property" (I'm not sure how anyone values something that exists solely in someone's head) but I'm not feeling too badly about Symantec getting hit up for some more taxes. Sure, they'll pass the cost on to the consumer, but nobody with functioning cognitive areas in their brain should be buying their stuff anyway.
But you're right
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.