{"id":20894,"date":"2013-05-21T07:30:01","date_gmt":"2013-05-21T06:30:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/?p=20894"},"modified":"2013-05-21T07:30:01","modified_gmt":"2013-05-21T06:30:01","slug":"apples-pernicious-call-to-legitimise-tax-abuse-to-advance-the-wealth-of-a-few-at-cost-to-the-world-at-large","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/2013\/05\/21\/apples-pernicious-call-to-legitimise-tax-abuse-to-advance-the-wealth-of-a-few-at-cost-to-the-world-at-large\/","title":{"rendered":"Apple’s pernicious call to legitimise tax abuse to advance the wealth of a few at cost to the world at large"},"content":{"rendered":"

At long last Apple is receiving high\u00a0profile\u00a0attention\u00a0for its tax avoidance, which is probably the\u00a0biggest such activity\u00a0in the world. As the FT reports this mornin<\/a>g:<\/p>\n

US congressional investigators on Monday accused\u00a0Apple\u00a0of avoiding paying billions in taxes around the world by exploiting loopholes and using Irish subsidiaries that are not tax residents of any country.<\/p>\n

The Senate permanent subcommittee on investigations released\u00a0a 40-page report on Apple\u2019s international tax structure\u00a0ahead of a hearing that will shine a harsh political spotlight on the US technology group.<\/p>\n

\u201cApple sought the Holy Grail of tax avoidance,\u201d said Carl Levin, the Democrat who chairs the panel and will lead\u00a0the hearing. \u201cIt has created offshore entities holding tens of billions of dollars, while claiming to be tax resident nowhere.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The\u00a0accusation, almost inevitably,\u00a0focuses\u00a0on the use of an\u00a0intermediary\u00a0state for making sales - Ireland in this case - and the subsequent stockpiling of wholly unproductive cash in a tax haven. The sums involved are staggering: the company has more than $100 billion in tax havens in cash, in turn a part of $1.9 trillion stashed by US companies in this way<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Now this is, without doubt, incentivised by the US tax system which only taxes profits in the US when repatriated to that country, which then encouarges US companies to abuse the law in other states, hide cash in tax havens and bolster their balance sheets tax free with money for which they have no use, bar boosting\u00a0executive\u00a0share\u00a0option\u00a0based pay, which this process fuels\u00a0towards\u00a0the stratosphere (and which no doubt explains it, in large part since it clearly has little or no shareholder\u00a0benefit\u00a0as they can't access these funds).<\/p>\n

What's Apple's\u00a0solution? Tim Cook of Apples is apparently one of many CEOs lobbying for large US companies to be allowed to bring this cash back into the US tax free.<\/p>\n

I sincerely hope the US resists that temptation. Rewarding the world's largest companies for their tax abuse,\u00a0their\u00a0use of tax havens, and their flagrant abuse of the law in\u00a0many\u00a0countries by seeking to avoid the tax they owe in those laces by the use of what are glaringly\u00a0obviously\u00a0tax driven and\u00a0otherwise\u00a0artificial commercial structures would be a reward to\u00a0those\u00a0seeking to undermine the rule of law, democracy and\u00a0our\u00a0way of life, as I have already argued this morning<\/a>.<\/p>\n

That's why the US has to also resist the pernicious calls to\u00a0legitimise\u00a0the unacceptable to advance the\u00a0wealth\u00a0of a few at cost to the world at large.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At long last Apple is receiving high\u00a0profile\u00a0attention\u00a0for its tax avoidance, which is probably the\u00a0biggest such activity\u00a0in the world. As the FT reports this morning: US
 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":[20,35,16,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20894","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-apple","category-economics","category-ethics","category-tax-avoidance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20894","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=20894"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20894\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20894"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20894"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20894"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}