{"id":18564,"date":"2012-12-10T07:30:44","date_gmt":"2012-12-10T07:30:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/?p=18564"},"modified":"2012-12-10T07:30:44","modified_gmt":"2012-12-10T07:30:44","slug":"microsofts-tax-avoidance-4-6-billion-worldwide","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/2012\/12\/10\/microsofts-tax-avoidance-4-6-billion-worldwide\/","title":{"rendered":"Microsoft&#8217;s tax avoidance &#8211; $4.6 billion, worldwide"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I have already written twice about Microsoft and it's tax\u00a0avoidance, <a title=\"Microsoft \u2014 looking like it\u2019s in the upper echelons of the tax avoiders\" href=\"http:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/2012\/12\/09\/microsoft-looking-like-its-in-the-upper-echelons-of-the-tax-avoiders\/\">one noting the press reaction to this issue<\/a>, and the <a title=\"Microsoft\u2019s potential tax avoidance \u2014 a more realistic estimate\" href=\"http:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/2012\/12\/09\/microsofts-potential-tax-avoidance-a-more-realistic-estimate\/\">second\u00a0suggesting\u00a0that the Mail had over-egged the scale of the issue<\/a> (which I still suggested might amount to \u00a3103 million).<\/p>\n<p>That though is still a significant amount of tax avoidance, so I re-checked\u00a0whether\u00a0the\u00a0figure is\u00a0plausible. I went back to the form 10-k (Microsoft's\u00a0annual accounts) (<a href=\"http:\/\/investing.businessweek.com\/research\/stocks\/financials\/secfilings.asp?ticker=MSFT\" target=\"_blank\">link from here<\/a>). The profits are \u00a3$22.26 billion. And on page 71 Microsoft says:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The reduction from the federal statutory rate from foreign earnings taxed at lower rates results from producing and distributing our products and services through our foreign regional operations centers in Ireland, Singapore, and Puerto Rico, which have lower income tax rates.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>They admit that the saving resulting is 21.1% of profit. That is $4.68 billion. That's about \u00a32.92 billion.<\/p>\n<p>Is it\u00a0plausible\u00a0that \u00a3103 million in the UK could form pat of that overall saving? I think so.<\/p>\n<p>Microsoft are, of course, very welcome to provide an explanation as to why I am wrong.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I have already written twice about Microsoft and it&#8217;s tax\u00a0avoidance, one noting the press reaction to this issue, and the second\u00a0suggesting\u00a0that the Mail had over-egged<br \/><a class=\"moretag\" href=\"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/2012\/12\/10\/microsofts-tax-avoidance-4-6-billion-worldwide\/\"><em> Read the full article&#8230;<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18564","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tax-avoidance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18564","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18564"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18564\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18564"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18564"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18564"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}