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A Third Of Cash Is Held By 5 US Tech Companies (siliconbeat.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Moody's Investors Service released an analysis Friday that shows Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Cisco Systems, and Oracle are sitting on $504 billion, which is roughly 30% of the $1.7 trillion in cash and cash equivalents held by U.S. non-financial companies in 2015. Almost all of their earnings ($1.2 trillion) are stashed overseas in an effort to avoid paying taxes on moving profits back to the U.S. under the country's complex tax code. Apple has more than 90 percent of its money located outside of the U.S., according to its most recent filings. Moody's said in its report that "we expect that overseas cash balances will continue to grow unless tax laws are changed to encourage companies to repatriate money." Some of the other tech and Silicon Valley companies in the top 50 include Intel, Gilead Sciences, Facebook, Amazon, Qualcomm, eBay, Hewlett-Packard and Yahoo.
No, the responsibility is to the corporation's charter, which may or may not indicate any responsibility to shareholders.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
A Third Of Cash Is Held By 5 US Tech Companies
roughly 30% of the $1.7 trillion in cash and cash equivalents held by U.S. non-financial companies in 2015
So actually it should be:
A third of all cash held by US non-financial companies in 2015 is held by 5 US tech companies
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
The money is not in the USA, it wasn't made in the USA
That's not true. For some of the money, yes, but we are talking about these companies managing to get 90% of their cash over there.
First, a lot of these companies change their headquarters overseas in name only, so they aren't technically US companies anymore. Then the US business concerns become some subsidiary of what is nominally a foreign company.
Then they'll take however much profit that would be declared in the US, and offset it with some accounting tricks like saying they needed to license their own brand name from their foreign parent company, which coincidentally totaled just about as much as would have been US profit.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
You really think Apple is selling a ton of iPhones in Ireland? When news stories report on taxes and Apple, they aren't talking about iPhones sold outside of USA. iPhones are more than just silicon and metal and glass. iPhones contain a shit ton of patented technology, technology that was invented in USA by Apple.
Apple shifts its profits by selling those patents, for _pennies_, to a shell company outside of the USA. Apple then pays the required taxes on that "profit" (35% of pennies, oh noes!). Meanwhile, the shell company has a collection of valuable patents it then licenses to Apple (for a lot of money) for use in iPhones. That shell company then pays the required taxes in Ireland.
Apple is using complex loopholes to save money, don't try to simplify this by saying 'iPhones sold outside the USA, get taxed outside USA'