I was amused by the FT's\u00a0juxtaposition\u00a0of a report on some growth in the Irish economy, about which the Irish Development Authority had\u00a0obviously\u00a0delivered some puff to the\u00a0press, with the true underlying cause, which the FT sees as tax abuse.<\/p>\n
As the FT puts it<\/a>:<\/p>\n Many foreign multinationals operating in Ireland supply goods and services throughout the European region and book their profits and pay tax on these in Dublin. Other companies, including Google, use legal tax avoidance strategies known as the \u201cDouble Irish\u201d and \u201cDutch Sandwich\u201d to book revenues in Ireland but shift these through the Netherlands and Bermuda to reduce their tax bill.<\/p>\n Records filed with Ireland\u2019s Companies Office show Google Ireland generated turnover worth \u00e2\u201a\u00ac12.5bn in 2011, gross profit of \u00e2\u201a\u00ac9bn, pre-tax profit of \u00e2\u201a\u00ac24.4m and paid \u00e2\u201a\u00ac22.2m in tax.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The Irish are in denial about this:<\/p>\n \u201cThe performance of our export oriented sectors are absolutely crucial to our recovery strategy,\u201d said Richard Bruton, Ireland\u2019s minister for enterprise.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Yes, of course they are. But he was forced to move on, presumably by\u00a0press\u00a0questioning:<\/p>\n He defended Ireland\u2019s 12.5 per cent corporate tax rate and said the country did not employ harmful tax practices.<\/p>\n \u201cLots of people have criticised it because they don\u2019t like what we do but it has always been clear that it does not breach any rules in terms of harmful tax competition. It is fair transparent and uniform across all companies,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Mr Bruton said Ireland\u2019s corporate tax rate was of \u201cabsolutely crucial national interest\u201d and a \u201cred line\u201d issue for the government.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I was amused by the FT’s\u00a0juxtaposition\u00a0of a report on some growth in the Irish economy, about which the Irish Development Authority had\u00a0obviously\u00a0delivered some puff to
Read the full article…<\/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":[5,102],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18850","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ireland","category-unitary-taxation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18850","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=18850"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18850\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18850"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18850"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18850"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}