"Double Irish" Tax Loophole Used By US Companies To Be Closed

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday October 14, 2014 @02:03PM from the luck-of-the-not-irish dept.

An anonymous reader writes: The Irish Finance Minister announced on Tuesday that Ireland will no longer allow companies to register in Ireland unless the companies are also tax resident. This will effectively close off the corporate tax avoidance scheme known as the "Double Irish" used by the likes of Google, Apple, and Facebook to route their earnings through their Irish holdings in order to garner an effective tax rate of, as in Google FY2013, 0.16%. Ireland's new policy will take effect in 2015 for new companies. "For existing companies, there will be provision for a transition period until the end of 2020."

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Re:What about the Dutch Charity? by Anonymous Coward · 2014-10-14 14:41 · Score: 5, Informative

Great link here. It's a shell game complicated enough to make a mollusk blush.
Re:Transition period? by alexander_686 · 2014-10-14 14:42 · Score: 5, Informative

For legitimate business this is true. This was not for legitimate business.
Each country has it's own tax laws as to when and what revenue they will tax. Because each country makes their own they don't dovetail like you think they should. The US has some crazy rules and Ireland had a gap. The results was that some income from intangible property (patents and trademarks mostly) fell into a gap between Ireland and US tax laws so it would never be taxed.