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EU Takes Ireland To Court For Not Claiming Apple Tax Windfall (reuters.com)
Philip Blenkinsop, reporting for Reuters: The European Commission said on Wednesday it was taking Ireland to the European Court of Justice for its failure to recover up to 13 billion euros ($15.3 billion) of tax due from Apple, a move labeled as "regrettable" by Dublin. The Commission ordered the U.S. tech giant in August 2016 to pay the unpaid taxes as it ruled the firm had received illegal state aid, one of a number of deals the EU has targeted between multinationals and usually smaller EU states. "More than one year after the Commission adopted this decision, Ireland has still not recovered the money," EU Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager said, adding that Dublin had not even sought a portion of the sum.
Hey, yeah, let's argue about this. I can call you something like "idiot", and then people can pick sides and we can all be angry at each other.
The answer is simple: as part of the EU treaty they signed, they can offer low tax rates overall, but their separate deal with Apple produced such low tax rates for Apple that the EU deemed it to be "state aid" to Apple, which is against EU rules. Zat help?
No, it's actually based on decency. And Europe isn't Socialist. It's Democratic Socialist which means certain things are sacrosanct (e.g. health care, education, etc.) and everything else is fair game as long as the rules are followed.
In Europe you generally don't see headlines about how some big corporation just reported its largest profit in its entire history and is also laying off thousands of workers.
Anonymous Cowards generally receive no replies because you're a coward and I'm a bitch
No, it's so they can funnel all the revenue earned GLOBALLY through Ireland.
EU as a whole, and most member and quasi-member nations, believe in social welfare, not corporate welfare. The US is different in this regard. Americans are against social welfare, but very much in favor of corporate welfare, under the misguided belief that this will translate into jobs.
It doesn't of course. Less taxes means more profits but more profits doesn't lead to more jobs. But since Americans are against social welfare, they have a comparatively poor public education system, so it's hardly surprising that the average american voter can not understand much more than rudimentary economics. Just look at how much they confuse the concept of a government budget with that of their own personal budget. Utterly senseless.
Corporation tax in Ireland is 12.5%. Apple gets a sweetheart deal from the Irish government and pays a lot less than 12.5%. Sweetheart deals like this are banned in the EU to prevent a race to the bottom by other small states. It's OK under EU rules for them to charge less than 12.5% but that has to be the rate for all corporation tax payers in Ireland, not just Apple and other big multinationals with similar deals.
It's something Ireland agreed to on accession to the EU. If they want to leave the EU and play these sorts of games, no problem but Apple relies on Ireland's EU membership to be able to shuffle their profits from all the other EU nations frictionlessly through their Irish offices and pay less tax than anywhere else. Outside the EU Ireland is no further use as a cheap-tax-rate haven for Apple et al.
It's not Apple at fault here, it's the notoriously corrupt Irish government that has traditionally played fast and loose with such financial rules in many other circumstances. The EU has had enough. If Ireland don't collect the taxes due from Apple I'd expect various EU grants and subsidies to be cut back pro rata on the basis that the Irish government had the chance to raise those revenues properly themselves by charging the correct rate of tax in the first place.