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European Commission To Issue Apple An Irish Tax Bill of $1.1 Billion, Says Report (reuters.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The European Commission will rule against Ireland's tax dealings with Apple on Tuesday, two source familiar with the decision told Reuters, one of whom said Dublin would be told to recoup over 1 billion euros in back taxes. The European Commission accused Ireland in 2014 of dodging international tax rules by letting Apple shelter profits worth tens of billions of dollars from tax collectors in return for maintaining jobs. Apple and Ireland rejected the accusation; both have said they will appeal any adverse ruling. The source said the Commission will recommend a figure in back taxes that it expects to be collected, but it will be up to Irish authorities to calculate exactly what is owed. A bill in excess of 1 billion euros ($1.12 billion) would be far more than the 30 million euros each the European Commission previously ordered Dutch authorities to recover from U.S. coffee chain Starbucks and Luxembourg from Fiat Chrysler for their tax deals. When it opened the Apple investigation in 2014, the Commission told the Irish government that tax rulings it agreed in 1991 and 2007 with the iPhone maker amounted to state aid and might have broken EU laws. The Commission said the rulings were "reverse engineered" to ensure that Apple had a minimal Irish bill and that minutes of meetings between Apple representatives and Irish tax officials showed the company's tax treatment had been "motivated by employment considerations."
... because they don't have a catchy portmanteau.
So the EU can just come down and tell it's member countries who they are and aren't allowed to give tax breaks to. This would be an interesting ruling though as ANY tax breaks would become illegal in the EU and thus there would be no viable way for companies to keep their business in the richer EU countries.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
This would be an interesting ruling though as ANY tax breaks would become illegal in the EU and thus there would be no viable way for companies to keep their business in the richer EU countries.
Umm, what? If they are paying taxes it's because they are profitable. Tax avoidance like Apple is doing is the difference between profits and more profits. You don't get taxed when you are losing money. Companies that are profitable now in "richer EU countries" would remain so, just to a lesser degree. Anyway the EU is a monetary union and there are rules relating to the flow of money within a monetary union. Just like the US being a part of the EU means that countries have given away some sovereignty in exchange for economic benefits. That's not necessarily a bad thing.
Wealthiest/filthiest gay man in the World! Is true!
Google is an Irish company too.
These deals were so routine wallstreet had a name for it: The Double Irish. Why is anyone even shocked.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
The corporate tax has been shrinking in America and the burden has been foisted on individuals. It is time to reverse the decades old trend.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
actually you can send the CEO and other members of the board to jail.
You are not understanding the problem.
I will try to explain it to you.
1) apple may be headquartered in Cupertino CA, but not all of its sales are in the United states.
2) because of this, and the way international taxation works, there are "apple UK", "Apple china", "Apple Korea", etc. These are wholly owned subsidiaries of Apple USA, but the product produced and sold, is sold exclusively in the subsidiary's local market. This allows the local branch to be taxed by the locall tax authority, on the profits made by that local branch. In theory at least.
3) what really happens is that Apple Ireland, which pays essentially zero taxes, claims sales volumes for markets outside of ireland, knowing that regulators cannot easily disprove that Apple Ireland is not just selling absurd numbers of apple products, and making all that profit legitimately. This is especially true, when Apple USA tells Apple EU to buy exclusively from Apple Ireland, and charge EU customers busing from them essentially a flat shipping cost that is the exact amount they buy fro. Apple Ireland. That artificially moves sales originating in the EU to Ireland's accounting. The actuAL sale occurs inside Ireland, and thus is billable in Ireland, under Irish tax law. (NEVERMIND where the product actually ships to.)
4) Apple says this is perfectly legitimate, Ireland concurs, but EU feels otherwise. EU tells Ireland that sales from EU citizens are originating in the EU, and need to be billed and taxed accordingly.
5)Apple USA, and Apple Ireland don't want those sales to be reported as originating in the EU, because then they have to pay taxes on those sales. Stamp little feet and threaten to take their ball and go home, or to go complain to their mommies.
"They also took advantage of the government's investment into infrastructure namely, roads, court systems, etc.. They should be required to pay their fair share of taxes just like everyone else."
A finish line which has been seen to move...
They earned much of that profit in the United States, and it should be taxed as such, yes. I don't get to send my salary off to a bank account in Ireland and magically render it untaxable. Why should Apple (and Google and Facebook and...) be able to do that?
"If there was a gay Afro-Puertorican Linux distribution, I'd give it a try" ~lucm
Ask Bernie Madoff.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
So how do you like them apples?
Not if they are rich and powerful enough. If Hillary hasn't showed you that, then you're an imbecile.
That latter statement is untrue in the US. You must pay taxes both to the foreign government, and to the US government.
Note the verbiage, and qualifications required to get ANY KIND of exclusion, and the specificity of that exclusion, as defined in US tax code below.
https://www.irs.gov/individual...
Apple's behavior here is very much a double standard compared to the average citizen.
Thats only if they are offering to create jobs.
If they are threatening to terminate jobs, that is called extortion.
The only reason Apple are in Ireland in the first place is that someone wanted all this tax stuff to just slip by under a regime designed to ignore it - pretty much.
Here, we'll throw a few jobs your way and a free round of golf, and you won't tax us like the UK, EU, US, Australia, etc. would if we did it there. That's the deal.
So if Apple are made to pay it anyway, they'll just take their ball elsewhere, where someone will turn a blind eye for less, which is why Ireland are APPEALING the decision...
Yes, but if by some magic process of having my brother, who is a foreign resident, send me an invoice for "services rendered" or "brand licensing", and I paid this invoice and claimed back all of the the tax I'd otherwise need to pay on the expense, when all my brother is doing is holding the cash on my behalf in a low-tax jurisdiction, then we'd have a situation akin to what's going on with Apple, Google et. al.
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
And how many got away with it? Piercing the corporate view is very hard. Only the very stupid get caught. Most of the management are really good at being weasels.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
piercing the corporate view is very hard. You have to try very hard esp. since RICO was struck down (thanks Scalia!).
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
And there lies the fallacy of trying to act as if corporations are people. They cannot be imprisioned and they can theoretically live forever. They CAN be put to death but I have never heard of it happening.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Does apple make more than 100k a year by sheltering in ireland? Yes, yes they do.
I have never heard of it happening
Just google. You know google, right? Immediate results include operations like Arthur Anderson ... formerly one of the biggest corporations of its kind in the world. Now essentially dead after the corporation was found criminally guilty in the Enron mess.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Its also about what would happen to you, the private citizen if you pulled this shit. HUGE penalties on top of what was owed and decades in jail in most countries....
Really? Private citizens would get in trouble if their government gave them tax breaks? Ireland and Apple entered into a voluntary agreement whereby Apple would keep jobs in Ireland in exchange for more favorable tax treatment. If this violates EU regulations, then it is the Irish government, not Apple, that is in the wrong, and it is the Irish government which should pay the back taxes.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
Can you give us some other examples? When you say, "operations like Arthur Anderson", I assume there were others.
http://scholarship.law.upenn.e...
You are welcome on my lawn.
401k plans were never meant to provide retirement for people. They were just meant to funnel money to people who already have all the money.
The total percentage of Vanguard instruments that are owned by the middle class is probably in the 1%-2% range. And Vanguard's total Apple exposure is in the 2%-3% range (at least according to the Vanguard statements). This bill for back taxes isn't going to move the needle one bit for anyone in the "middle class".
You are welcome on my lawn.
USA does not want to mess with the internal of the company or how it prices and deals with different divisions internally. All USA is saying is, we will tax you on worldwide income. You declare profits anyway you want, anywhere you want, pay whatever taxes you want to pay to any government you want to pay. If by US law you would have paid X$ as taxes, you pay that much in tax. If all the taxes you have paid to all other governments does not add up to X$, you pay the rest to ?USA. This is completely logical, completely made with one goal. To stop companies from racing to the bottom. Companies shop around for governments to pay the least overall tax. What USA wants to do is to make sure that they can't race to the bottom.
You declare profit anywhere you want, pay any tax due to any government. But overall you can not reduce your tax burden below a certain threshold. That is the stand taken by the US government. It is entirely logical and necessary to prevent the race to the bottom. Only people fooled by the billionaire funded media and the paid shills of them believe USA is taxing too much and the corporations are victims.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I don't think the words "morally" and "taxation" belong in the same sentence. No matter how you think a society should be run, the forced confiscation of private property using a threat of violence is not moral. I am not proposing an alternative, but a lack there-of does not make extortion in any way "moral".
So, low taxes attract jobs after all? And the European Commission admits it?
"Please don't give us that billion dollars we're told you owe us" said no one ever...except Ireland.
Err no, that's not quite how it would work. You in the US would not collect the tax, but you would tell the EU to collect it. In this case the EU is claiming that Ireland broke the rules about state aid, and that Ireland should now reclaim that money.
Below $100,000k your foreign earnings are tax-exempt.
That statement is false. I live in a country with a tax treaty with the US. As an ex-pat, I am required to file taxes with the IRS each year. Because of the treaty, taxes I pay on foreign income are deducted from taxes owed to the IRS. That does not mean my income is tax-exempt. It means I have a deduction.
(It happens to be that I pay more to my current government than I would have owed the IRS, so I don't pay any US taxes. That's still just a deduction, not an exemption.)
I hope someone's iPhone screen breaks and the pieces are jammed into your eyeballs.
You do know that Apple doesn't own any factories, right? Facts don't matter to shit-headed morons like you, though.
I am not taking a position of the morality of taxes, but a translated quote from a religious text doesn't define morality.
A ridiculously small number. Wall Street has wised up to this, you just spread the paperwork and signatures all around, and then it's everybody goes to jail or nobody...
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Wait.... are you saying that if the EU demands back money from illegal tax breaks, it will be Californian teacher's money? So those teachers were actually profiting from tax fraud? Well, then they should be glad that they only have to pay back tose illegal profits and not also face criminal prosecution.
bickerdyke
Problem is that making deals with a government is not illegal.
These companies, no matter how evil, acted according to how the lawmakers told them would not be illegal.
The government may be acting illegally, but who's going to sue them?
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This argument is insane. So independently of whatever tax fraud Apple makes, it is wrong to punish them for it, because the stock price will be hit? Tough luck, maybe you shouldn't buy shares of a tax-dodging company in the first place.
entropy happens
This is faulty logic. When your accountant makes a mistake with your taxes it does not make your accountant liable for paying the difference. This is always true: when someone else who is acting on your behalf makes a mistake it never absolves you of legal responsibility. It's Apple's responsibility to check with all applicable laws and make sure things are on the up-and-up, regardless of what Ireland may have offered them.
Except Apple are registering all the EU sales in Ireland making vast profits on that but only paying taxes on the profits for devices sold in Ireland. This works because Ireland is a small country in the EU.
The rest of the EU is upset about that and has decided that is illegal state aid and back taxes are owed, and I suspect Ireland will then be fined the amount of the back taxes so they don't get to profit from it.
It's not just Apple, other firms do the same, so Microsoft, Dell, and Google to name a few are likely to face large tax bills in the future once this has played out for doing exactly the same.
The back-taxes usually on go back to the point at which they were warned they were not paying enough tax. Once warned there is no excuse for not paying or at least setting money aside while resolving the dispute.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
piercing the corporate view is very hard. You have to try very hard esp. since RICO was struck down (thanks Scalia!).
It's corporate veil.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I don't think the words "morally" and "taxation" belong in the same sentence. No matter how you think a society should be run, the forced confiscation of private property using a threat of violence is not moral. I am not proposing an alternative, but a lack there-of does not make extortion in any way "moral".
The alternative to taxation would be an anarchistic network of individuals freely co-operating, or complete corporate fascism, depending on your view of human nature.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
European Commission will punish California Teachers? You don't believe it?
If a tax ruling is made, irrespective of appellation process Apple stock will take a hit. A big hit. Huge bite to capitalization.
One of the largest Apple shareholders is Vanguard Funds, and Vanguard Funds are owned by multiple 401k and pension plans in USA. Bottom line is that not only teachers, but many in the middle class will lose a boatload of money because European Commission, directed by unelected president Junker TOLD Ireland to change treatment of Ireland's laws and to extort more money.
Every time those bureaucrats try fixing and every time there will be unintended consequences, they always fuck up.
If appeals are not successful and a precedent is formed, then expect Ireland to become much less desirable manufacturing location. There will major job and investment losses.
Expect eventually Ireland to leave EU
If a pension fund can be seriously damaged by what happens to the stock value of one company in its portfolio, then that pension fund is not being run properly.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
#Ireland gave illegal tax benefits to #Apple worth up to €13 billion (image)
https://twitter.com/EU_Commiss...
Apple has shittons of money, and this number is too lax.
Apparently the latest number in other articles is €13 billion, see BBC.
And if their profitability falls below what investors demand as a return, then those companies move to China or close entirely, and investors put their money elsewhere. And if you don't leave investors any place to put their money with sufficient profits, they simply stop investing altogether.
In general your argument is nonsense. What do you mean "move to China or close entirely"? Do you seriously think Apple is going to close down if they make 20% net margin instead of 25% net margin? Do you seriously think they are going to become a Chinese company? Spare me. Apple already is in China in about the biggest way possible. They aren't going to move and they certainly aren't going to ignore the EU market. At most a company might relocate some production but production isn't sales and taxes occur where the sales do (or should anyway). Companies aren't going to close their doors because they make a 6% profit instead of a 10% profit. It just doesn't work that way. They might change beneficial owners but the company won't disappear. Your argument makes zero sense.
So instead of competing with each other on tax rates to attract companies (like Ireland has), they're trying to sue the competition away.
Even if Ireland takes the money, it's theft from the rest of the EU where the majority of the business was transacted. The proposed unified taxation system would fix that, and maybe now the UK is locked out of the negotiations it can proceed.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
The government may be acting illegally, but who's going to sue them?
The EC could fine their country.
Let's not forget that it is being part of EU's economic zone that made Ireland an interesting place to invest in the first place.
"The standard rate of Irish corporate tax is 12.5%. The Commissions's investigation concluded that Apple had effectively paid 1% tax on its European profits in 2003 and about 0.005% in 2014."
0.005%, are you fucking kidding me?
RICO hasn't been struck down. In fact, there is a case listed in the Wikipedia involving RICo from just last year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"You found a way to legally avoid paying about $1B of what we would normally collect from you. So we're going to fine you $1B for being so crafty!"
No, that's not going to fly. And I don't care who it is that did it. That's not a practice I want applied to me, so that's not a practice that I want to see applied to anybody else.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Wrong under EU tax law a company registered in the EU only has to pay tax on it's profits generated in the whole of the EU in the country where it is registered.
So if Apple Ireland sells a iPhone in the UK or Germany the profit it makes on that is taxable in Ireland.
The problem is that Ireland cut Apple a special deal that says Apple only has to pay taxes on the profit made in Ireland. That's great for Ireland because it attracts Apple to locate it's headquarters in Ireland and that provides jobs, and they still get all the tax they otherwise would have.
On the other hand the rest of the EU is royally pissed off, and have decided that it amounts to illegal state aid, hence the fine. I believe in no particular order Microsoft, Dell and Google also do the same, so expect to see requirements for large back tax bills for these firms too in the not too distant future.
This is quite separate from the sell brandnames at inflated prices tax dodge that the likes of Starbucks operate.
It's also separate from the Amazon we don't actually make profits because we reinvested it all to grow the company so no tax to pay scheme that Amazon have historically operated. This is not a tax dodge in my view but Amazon have been almost unique it operating it for such a long period of time that it has been unfairly branded as a tax dodge.
Beyond the obvious targeting of Apple, the most profound and harmful effect of this ruling will be on investment and job creation in Europe. Using the Commission’s theory, every company in Ireland and across Europe is suddenly at risk of being subjected to taxes under laws that never existed.
The EU's conundrum is that without the tax break there's no reason for Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc. to have any European operations other than sales fullfillment. Do they really want to kiss those tens of thousands of jobs goodbye?
That's a moral standpoint with no useful impact.
I designed a Universal Social Security plan which reduces the tax burden on Americans by over $1 TRILLION per year. This plan completely remediates the welfare system; establishes a stable minimum income, eliminating many risks in providing goods and services to lower-income markets (currently, their income is unstable and can go away quickly, incurring massive costs for landlords especially); and slows and thus spreads the reduction of jobs by technical progress (including globalization and automation), thus reducing the short-term economic threat of sudden rapid progress (the long-term impact is always an immense increase in standard-of-living; a sudden industrial revolution creates an economic train wreck, while a longer period of growth creates immediate prosperity).
Money bound up in big bank accounts has almost no impact on the economy. Pulling it out and spending it in bulk, suddenly, causes a temporary stimulus, and largely creates inflation. This is because more money is put into play, but not more productivity; after you stop infusing huge piles of cash into the economy, there's no support for any new jobs created, except for what technical progress has occurred during the inflationary period of excess money creation (money idled and not spent is essentially removed; pouring it into the economy is essentially money creation, and differs from printing new money in that it doesn't then increase the fractional reserve basis and lead to more money creation by loaning).
By contrast, a Universal Social Security (or other effective form of Universal Basic Income) increases the amount of take-home pay relative to cost dollars. That is to say: If an employer pays $10,000 to have an employee, then that employee's work is paid for by consumers of the product the employee makes. If the employee makes 10,000 units of said product per year, then $1 of that product's per-unit price represents the employee's pay. Out of this, the employee may take home only $6,000. UBIs such as the USS change the situation such that the employee takes home, for example, $8,000, while the employer still pays only $10,000.
Obviously, such a situation means products don't face a cost increase (you still need $1 of revenue per unit to pay that guy's salary and benefits), yet consumers have more money to spend.
Look back and think about the engineering involved there. Some changes to tax policy reduce the welfare burden by over $1 trillion per year, increasing the amount of take-home pay for all working Americans, lifting low-income households out of poverty, and ensuring even non-working Americans have income sufficient for a hard-bounded minimum (but low) standard of living. Businesses don't pay any additional costs, and particularly don't pay more costs as consequence of hiring an employee; and the employee takes home more dollars per dollar paid by the employer to employ them. That changes the stable set points of the system, increasing the consumer's spending power relative to the cost of production, thus increasing buying power.
What's the engineering involved in grabbing a fistful of cash out of Apple? Hint: Apple's entire profits ($10 billion per year) would amount to $58.48/year more in every single American's paycheck; their entire cash savings is about $1,000 per working American (ONE time, not repeating). Total actual corporate profits in the United States are roughly 10% of all income--that's not small and not insignificant (it's 10%), and it's only unimportant because the economy is so much bigger than all that.
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Correct, there is no way to claim that taxes are 'moral' since they are extracted through the violent means of the State.
This is 'legal' racketeering by the State, the State is the organized crime syndicate, nothing else at all.
Also I must say, for Apple it makes sense to strike back in a completely immoral way as well, by hiring special forces at a fraction of the 14.5 Billion USD (14 and a half billion USD, not 1.1 as is stated in the /. headline), digging every possible piece of dirt on every politician involved in this racketeering, blackmailing most, taking out some others. It's just cheaper and it sends the correct signal.
MY OTHER COMMENTS
It is specifically the EC finding that Ireland broke international agreements.
In case of Irish non-compliance, EC could fine them, but I think it would be more appropriate to remove them from the Common Market, with all that that entails.
Or, you know, the affected countries could remove the loopholes that allows this to occur. I agree that "all taxes should be paid where the revenue is generated", but that's a matter of law for the country in which the revenue is generated (including in the Americas). It's not as if this is an unknown issue, it's just that "campaign contributions" (and the fact that your politicians come from the same socio-economic class as these companies) keep the loopholes open.
what really happens is that Apple Ireland, which pays essentially zero taxes, claims sales volumes for markets outside of ireland, knowing that regulators cannot easily disprove that Apple Ireland is not just selling absurd numbers of apple products
Not quite.
Regulators can easily tell how much revenue was generated in a given country from sales in that country. But profit is the difference between revenue and cost, and it's easy for Apple to artificially inflate the costs of the various subsidiaries. It could do this by jacking up the price the subsidiaries pay for the products they sell, but the more common approach is to license IP, such as trademarks, for amounts of money chosen to ensure that the subsidiary makes no profit, or even generates a loss where that is advantageous.
That way, the profits can be realized in a locale with low taxes, like Ireland. This does mean that all of the cash flows to those low-tax locations, and that it's then difficult to move it elsewhere (e.g. to the US) without getting a big chunk eaten up by the taxes in the destination country. This is the primary reason why the tech companies that use this Ireland scheme keep huge piles of cash (like Apple's $200B), rather than paying out dividends.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Ireland is one of the parties who makes applicable tax laws. Another is the EU. Another is the US. That's the point.
Let's say Nebraska decides that corporations that host in their borders do not have to pay any local, state, or federal taxes. If a corporation took that deal and stopped paying federal taxes, I think the I.R.S. would still be upset with them. Ireland being part of the E.U. has agreed to a bunch of treaties about how corporate taxes can be accommodated. This investigation is based on that. If Ireland was not party to any treaties about this then you would be accurate that there is nothing anyone else can say.
And rightly so. Working people are paying betweeen 38 - 52 % income tax (in the Netherlands), and big companies like Apple, Starbucks, etc are paying almost no taxes (Apple paid 0.005% in Ireland) with all the money going to shareholders and massively overpaid CEOs. Some USA CEOs get more salary than small country's budget.
It's stealing from the poor and giving to the already-rich. There are already concerns that this wealth-gap will result in riots and revolutions. This theft has to stop before it gets out of hand, your billions are no use if you have to employ a small army to protect yourself, your family, hell even your mother-in-law (ask Bernie Eclestone).
All countries in the world will benefit from local taxes being paid, specifically 3rd world countries which are being robbed of their assets via bribed officials and cannot feed or employ their people. And if all these companies pay their taxes, taxes for the working class can come down. That's the Robin Hood way, taxing the rich and giving to the poor.
So, you believe that Apple and other companies don't realize that they're attempting to evade taxation when they engage in these Dutch-Irish sandwiches?
And no, it won't move the market by a noticeable amount, any more than a tax increase or decrease moves the stock market by a noticeable amount, except maybe on the day it's announced.
You are welcome on my lawn.
EU meddling in Irish affairs.
This!
That really depends on whether the laws this arrangement allegedly broke applied to Apple, Ireland, or both. If Ireland agreed to certain terms when joining the EU, but this deal with Apple violated those, then it's certainly at least partly Ireland's fault.
Examine even your most deeply held beliefs. Nobody is always right.
Ireland and Apple entered into a voluntary agreement
And apparently an agreement that Ireland, being part of the EU was not allowed to make.
The mountains of madness have many little plateaus of sanity - Terry Pratchett.
According to Wired - http://www.wired.com/2016/08/a...
Apple are buying iPhones, made in China, by an Irish subsidiary and then selling them from their Irish subsidiary to US distributors, so the profits on the sale of the iPhones is booked through Ireland - although Wired don't explicitly say that it's US distributors, it could be their EU disties instead...
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
Piercing the corporate view is very hard.
Is that when you poke their eyes with a pin? Perhaps you mean "veil"?
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Drop federal from your analogy and it might be close. Would it be the fed's job to tell Nebraska that they had to charge more state tax? That hasn't happened in Delaware yet.
Ireland is within their power to charge whatever tax rate they want, the EU is telling them that they aren't allowed to have taxes set as low as they are. Nebraska has no authority to rule on federal taxes, so it just doesn't match.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
This is faulty logic. When your accountant makes a mistake with your taxes it does not make your accountant liable for paying the difference. This is always true: when someone else who is acting on your behalf makes a mistake it never absolves you of legal responsibility.
Ireland was not acting on Apple's behalf. Ireland was the taxation authority, not the E.U.
It's Apple's responsibility to check with all applicable laws and make sure things are on the up-and-up, regardless of what Ireland may have offered them.
The laws in question were Irish tax laws, and Apple was abiding by them. If Ireland's laws violated some E.U. meta-laws, that should be Ireland's problem, not Apple's.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
> 401k plans were never meant to provide retirement for people. They were just meant to funnel money to people who already have all the money.
With an $18k limit on 401(k) contributions, they're not exactly designed for stashing huge amounts of money for rich people. The extra-wealthy may certainly own the majority of funds in *other* instruments at Vanguard, but most of their money is *not* -- cannot be -- in 401(k)s.
It's not about getting money into Vanguard instruments, it's about getting money into the market, where it becomes the piggy bank for the rich.
When the stock market goes up, those 401(k) accounts will go up more slowly than the market generally. And when they go down, the financial elite will get the memo ahead of time leaving the poor schlubs who think their 401(k) accounts are secure holding the bag. This is not theoretical. It happened just eight short years ago and it's going to happen again.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Ah. I interpreted you as saying "The ultra-rich have their money in 401(k) accounts", but it looks like you were saying the opposite -- that the ultra-wealthy are the ones *not* in 401(k)s.
I would think, though, that for 401(k)s to become a significant "piggy bank" to the rich, they'd have to represent more than the 1% your earlier "middle class holds 1-2% total" declaration suggests -- where it doesn't seem they could provide a boost to other accounts significant enough to even notice.
*sigh* 401(k)s... I'd like to like them, but...yeah, what could have been a decent idea was mutilated by restrictions in a way that nobody can like them. Give employees control of where they invest? Allow them to have almost anything they want inside of that instrument? Great idea, except:
1. The avg worker isn't exactly a financial genius, nor do they want to become one.
2. The choice is restricted to what the employer has to offer (unless you frequently change jobs, etc. to move funds out and into IRAs, but then those aren't 401(k); the 401(k) still stinks.)
3. Too many HR managers are stupid, lazy, or corrupt, and there are plenty of institutions and "consultants" ready to take full advantage of that, so your choices are often very poor.
4. At least in the old days, if a company's pension plan was bad they knew it reflected poorly on them. Now, they just point to the 401(k) and say it's someone else's fault it didn't work out so well.