Italy Investigates Apple For Alleged Tax Fraud 175
Frankie70 writes in with some more bad news for Apple in Europe. "U.S. tech giant Apple is under investigation in Italy for allegedly hiding 1 billion euros ($1.34 billion) from the local tax authority, two judicial sources with direct knowledge of the matter told Reuters. Milan prosecutors say Apple failed to declare to Italian tax authorities 206 million euros in 2010 and 853 million euros in 2011, one of the sources said, confirming a report by Italian magazine L'Espresso. The Italian subsidiary of Apple booked some of its profit through Irish-based subsidiary Apple Sales International (ASI), thus lowering its taxable income in Italy, the source said."
italians (Score:5, Interesting)
Not the people to try tax evasion with...they are pros
Re:italians (Score:4, Funny)
If they're based in Ireland, why are they in Italy (Score:5, Insightful)
They do business in Italy. They get money in Italy. They pay Apple (Eire) an extremely uncomptetitive rate for the "rights" to use their own frigging products in Italy so that they make no profit off massive revenue.
It's absolutely no different from Hollywood Accounting.
And it IS tax evasion.
If a private corporation cannot make 3% ROI, then it's a failure. Since so many multinationals manage to wrange a way to a NEGATIVE return on investment, then how the hell is this fatuous meme "The private industry can be profitable, the government can only run things into the ground" created?
Because they're avoiding taxes by tricks.
They have two options
1) they are incompetent, in which case they should be closed down by shareholders for incompetent management and all C*O pay should be slashed because so few manage to make any profit for the company.
2) they are illegally evading taxes but are otherwise actually competent at business
Re:If they're based in Ireland, why are they in It (Score:5, Insightful)
Technically it's tax avoidance, which is immoral but not illegal.
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Well in this case, apparently not.
I think that's precisely why Apple is being investigated here, what's mere avoidance in other countries sounds like it may well be evasion in Italy.
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I'd be extremely surprised if it was Tax Evasion as Apple has very competent lawyers and accountants and the methods employed are clearly legal according to the laws as they stand. If Italy changes their laws to make the Double Irish illegal & Apple still tried to tunnel their profits out of Italy using it, then it would be illegal.
Every single state in the EU has refused to outlaw the strategy Apple, Google, Starbucks, etc are using because unless they all change at the same time, the countries that ou
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Well in this case, apparently not.
I think that's precisely why Apple is being investigated here, what's mere avoidance in other countries sounds like it may well be evasion in Italy.
that's exactly the case. the judiciary in Italy have given an enormously lax interpretation of abuse of law, to the extent that it is in the sole and retrospective interpretation of the tax authorities to say what the law actually intended years ago. Mind you, that leads to byzantine tax laws, since the legislator has no interest whatsoever to do it right the first time.
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Anyone with a positive IQ know what is going on and in the current form it's legal.
What the prosecution hopes is to find an error somewhere and make them pay a fine.
They are tackling global tax avoidance in the most stupid way and it's not an Apple problem, any company that earns enough pays income taxes only if they want.
Avoidance = Evasion (Score:3)
Technically it's tax avoidance
Avoidance is a synonym for evasion. A distinction without a difference whether it is legal or not. They might be obeying the letter of the law but it is tax evasion nonetheless.
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Not it’s not. Let’s talk about “Transfer Pricing” which is subjective. Issue like this happen because the tax rules in the two different countries and not aligned. It is a subjective quagmire with no correct answer. Heck, I am hard pressed to think of 2 countries where they are aligned. However, there are rational solutions out there.
Apple (Ireland) and Apple (Italy) sell a product and make $100 in profit.
Apple claims most of the profit was made in Ireland and is subject to Ireland
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So you are an expert on Italian law? It is a common trick used by many companies but it is illegal in most places. The hard part for the local tax offices though is to prove the internal pricing between Apple offices is fraudulent.
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The EU is already working on a fix. The plan is to make any company that does business in the EU pay tax proportionate to the amount of business it does in each member state, regardless of where it is based or how much money it claims to be losing due to nonsense licensing fees etc. You do business here, you pay, simple as that.
Naturally the Irish and UK governments are against it, but seems likely they won't be able to stop it happening.
Hardly immoral (Score:2)
Technically it's tax avoidance, which is immoral but not illegal.
Given what most governments do with the money, it doesn't seem at all immoral to withhold as much as possible from them (especially the Italian government).
Remember that your tax dollars are funding the NSA.
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Failing to starve the beast is immoral. Tax avoidance is not only moral, it's an imperative.
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It's absolutely no different from Hollywood Accounting. . . Because they're avoiding taxes by tricks.
Um, that's a contradiction. Corporations like Apple pay less in taxes because they can find loopholes. That's very different than a corporation basically lying to their creditors about how much money they made. I suspect that the Italian government, because it is desperate for money, are now going after practices that they've allowed for years even though tax laws have not changed.
In crisis-hit Italy, tax authorities faced with dwindling revenues have become more aggressive with domestic and multinational companies.
They have two options
Or they can wait until the audit is over and Italy finds that they did nothing wrong.
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Corporations like Apple pay less in taxes because they can find loopholes.
We call them loopholes specifically because they present a way to do a run around the intent of the law. Simply by speaking English correctly you have doomed your own argument.
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Italy actually still cares about the spirit/intent of the law apparently. Something blatantly done to get around paying a proper percentage of taxes from their standpoint should be punishable.
When it comes to tax law I don't agree with this, because governments waste/funnel taxes en masse a la the NSA comment above. However there are many instances in the US justice system where a "technicality" or "loophole" was the definitive argument in a case. At some point we went from valuing the letter of the law ove
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It's not some secret that Apple has been doing this for years. Many other companies like Google do the same. And Italy was fine with it as Apple passed audits for many years. Now Italy thinks differently because they are facing financial crisis. If Italy cared all along, they didn't care enough to address it earlier.
From what I know of the Italian government, judgment changes based on whoever is in power at the moment. The shed I built last year was up to code. New government, new judgment --> now I
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It is closer than you think. Neither case is about lying.
In Apple’s case they are shifting the profit (and thus taxes) from Italy to Ireland. Is Apple doing this to boost profits? Yes. Is there a large amount of subjectivity in meshing Irish and Italian tax codes together? Yes. Should a country be able to structure its tax code to boost growth? Yes.
In Hollywood they shift revenue (and thus payouts) from the movie to the production and distribution companies. I have a lower regard for Hollywood accoun
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Really? In years past I was able to deduct certain things on my taxes. Now my state decides those are no longer deductions but the tax code hasn't changed. Is that clarifying or changing?
Apparently you want them to change their legal system without changing their legal system's procedures.
Er what? Apparently you want countries to change laws without having to go through their constitutional processes whatsoever. Today in Italy, theft is now considered murder. New head of state, new meanings.
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O.K. – I will bite. If Ireland can’t structure its tax code and shouldn’t determine how their economy should run, who should? And if the answer is Italy, does that mean Argentina gets to run Italy’s revenue service?
Re:If they're based in Ireland, why are they in It (Score:5, Insightful)
They do business in Ireland and they sell to customers in Italy. The whole point of the EU is it's a single market, that means, you can establish your company once and sell to everyone within that market. If you set up in Ireland and sell to Italians, not only is that not tax evasion, that is the point of the EU in the first place!
These companies have all had exactly the same tax arrangements for years and as Apple point's out in the article, have been repeatedly audited and passed. In fact Italy appears to have audited Apple three years in a row, which seems only explainable as harassment - tax audits are supposed to be semi-random spot checks to ensure compliance. If you pass an audit, getting audited the next year is just a waste of time and money for all concerned.
What's happening now is that a lot of governments around the world, having spent many decades promoting trade and economic integration when times were good and they had excessively cheap credit, now decided that maybe free trade isn't such a hot idea after all. After all, it might mean that other countries who you trade with end up more appealing to do business in. Ireland has had a long-standing policy of aggressively attracting international businesses with low tax rates, it's a very popular policy amongst the people in Ireland, and in fact until their government foolishly panicked and committed to a full bailout of their banks their economy was doing great. If the Italians are now mad about it, they have two choices:
1) Start rolling back the EU single market, then they can pass rules that say "if you want to sell stuff to Italians, you must run your business out of Italy and pay whatever taxes we want to do that" (of course this means some companies won't bother)
2) Deal with it and find other sources of revenue, whilst enjoying the fact that when Italian companies sell to the Irish, the Italians get to keep the corporate tax from that.
Right now governments are trying to do both simultaneously, which is why they grind to a halt in an internal deadlock of contradictions and you get bizarre setups like companies buying things from themselves.
Apple specifically will "solve itself" after a while because probably, Ireland will start making them corporation tax in Ireland safe in the knowledge that it's still more appealing than the alternatives. However this will not satisfy other members of the EU who dislike tax competition.
By the way, your post is very emotional. Tax should not be an emotional topic. Tax is (or rather should be) a technical matter in which people analyze the most efficient ways to raise the revenues governments need to function. Whether corporation tax is even a good idea at all is a matter of some debate in academic circles - the fact that you're trying to tax an entity that doesn't actually have any specific physical location is one reason why everyone ends up feeling like it's "not fair".
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The whole point of the EU is it's a single market, that means, you can establish your company once and sell to everyone within that market.
Except that Apple does have an Italian corporation that runs its stores there, provides tech support, advertising, manages the local business and so forth. That company just doesn't make any profit because it has to pay crippling licensing fees to Apple Ireland, a shell company. Strangely though it doesn't go out of business despite these losses.
The Italians quite correctly recognize this arrangement as bullshit, a silly tax dodging scheme designed to prevent an Italian company paying its fair share of tax.
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Yes, they were doing pretty great [wikipedia.org], so great that the name "Celtic Tiger" was invented specifically to describe the Irish economy.
Like most economies that have inflationary currencies, this led to exuberance and dumping of money into a housing bubble, on the theory that whilst money inflates away houses don't. Being in the Euro had nothing to do with this, it's a disease that affected the USA and the UK as well, even though they have their own currencies and central banks. In fact these governments (but espe
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Apple does not produce anything in Italy; the local subsidiary is involved in marketing, and own and operates a relatively small number of own brand stores. By "own brand", read:
1. the company selling the goods is really Apple;
2. it always will have its European headquarters in the most favourable tax place, and no, it will not be Italy. deal with it
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Tax dodges like this are only acceptable in the US. In most of Europe using "shell companies" and "subsidiaries" to hide income or evade taxes, especially for that express purpose is a big no-no.
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Yep. There was an interesting video released a few month ago that showed one of the tax expert working for Apple. He was payed massive sums of money to do this. He basically finds loopholes in the tax systems and uses them. Apple was known to be one of the best at it. I remember a figure of 1.9% tax paid on all revenues generated outside the USA.
This article talks about the USA tax loopholes they used legally.
http://www.idigitaltimes.co.uk/articles/469528/20130521/apple-evades-taxes-shifting-profits-oversea [idigitaltimes.co.uk]
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Maybe not, but I'm guessing that Apple employs a team of lawyers that do. This sounds like a fishing expedition from a European state who is currently in a financially shaky position, during a time of political change. It's easy to score some cheap political points by beating up on the big bad American corporate tax cheats, and when the whole thing is dismissed in a few months, no one will report squat.
Unless, of course, Apple is actually breaking Italian revenue code, in which they need to cough up the c
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These companies have been running in Ireland for years, if it was illegal don't you think this would have been noticed by now? Here, read this [theregister.co.uk] and you may gain some clarity on the matter.
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Corporations should pay taxes otherwise people would just hide their personal profits in Corporations - many already do - they get "paid nothing", but get to use the resources of the corporation as theirs.
I'm fine with Corporations not paying taxes on profits that aren't theirs.
But it sure seems unfair when a Corporation starts treating certain profits as if it owns them but still doesn't have to pay any taxes on them.
For example,
a) if a corporation can include the profit in its financial reports as part of
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Maybe you don't know exactly European taxes laws.
Either him or Italian politicians. Many of whom are known tax frauds. No, wait, those actually knew what they were doing. Anyway
"The Italian tax authorities already audited Apple Italy in 2007, 2008 and 2009 and confirmed that we were in full compliance with the OECD documentation and transparency requirements. We are confident the current review will reach the same conclusion."
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This is only because the people who want big government demanded it pay those companies for their risky behavior. The people who want smaller government, like myself, said "Fuck them, let them starve."
I'm not sure on which side you care to place me for that, but I think it was the more consistent stance.
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You're missing the fact that the tech industry does not have the political clout in Washington that outfits like Wall Street and the UAW do. It shoulders its own risk and doesn't get bailouts like the more bribery-aware industries do. If it did, we'd still be ordering our pet food online from a sock puppet.
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Apple better pay up, then - glass is so terrible fragile :).
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"Oh please. Are you telling me everything is fine and done by the book in the promised land of mafia?"
Yes that was the joke. You got it good job!
Predictable (Score:2)
While despicable since megacorps like Apple have no defense for not paying what's owed as part of the cost of doing business, it remains to be said that the taxation system worldwide is completely out of control. No percentage will ever be enough for any government and thus tax paying entities must find techniques to minimize the fleecing.
Re: Predictable (Score:5, Insightful)
Your tax is so high because these people don't pay any. 1 billion divided by 30 million taxpayers in Italy is 30 bucks each.
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Trouble is that argument implies there is some magic number that equals Enough for the taxing authority, and there isn't. Or it's enough for that year, then it must be raised again. And again. And Again... Entities not paying tax are not the cause of ever increasing rates.
There is such a value. (Score:2, Insightful)
Paying for the stuff being done is a "magic number that equals Enough for the taxing authority".
Morover, when the subject is executive compensation, you're all about how it's allowed that they can just be given as much as they can get away with because "you can't put a limit on what someone earns".
Yet when it comes to government, somehow, there's a magic number that they cannot spend above and must be limited.
Hell of a double standard you've got there.
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Entities not paying tax are a direct cause of increasing rates, because the rates have to go up to compensate for the lost income from the criminals not paying their fair share.
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Your tax is so high because these people don't pay any. 1 billion divided by 30 million taxpayers in Italy is 30 bucks each.
Ha-ha. Who do you think pays the money to the corporations that they then hand it to the government?
Hint: it's not the space fairies.
Corporate taxes are just a way to tax more money from 'the people' while getting idiots like yourself to cheer it on. Every penny comes from increased prices, reduced wages, or reduced income for stockholders.
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Ha-ha. Who do you think pays the money to the corporations that they then hand it to the government?.
Let's see: If the American company Apple does business in Italy but moves it's money to Ireland to pay taxes there, the taxes lost to the Italian treasury are paid by... ah yes, here it is: The Italian people.
The Italian people first pay the multinationalcompany for the products and then again have to make up for the taxes that this company evaded paying.
And the multinational gets richer and richer...
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Ha-ha. Who do you think pays the money to the corporations that they then hand it to the government?
Hint: it's not the space fairies.
Corporate taxes are just a way to tax more money from 'the people' while getting idiots like yourself to cheer it on. Every penny comes from increased prices, reduced wages, or reduced income for stockholders.
Look, that's a good argument when you're talking about a utility, or necessities. But an Apple computer is not a necessity, it is a Luxury. Same with the various iDevices. Even if you have a legitimate need for a device which does what they do, there's still a cheaper option that does the same stuff. Your argument simply does not apply. Putting the tax burden on corporations does indeed result in them raising their prices. Then the consumer can see up front the actual cost of their economic activity, and wh
Tax incidence (Score:2)
Ha-ha. Who do you think pays the money to the corporations that they then hand it to the government?
You are talking about tax incidence [wikipedia.org].
Corporate taxes are just a way to tax more money from 'the people' while getting idiots like yourself to cheer it on.
In many cases you are quite correct but that logic falls apart somewhat (though not completely) when you are talking about large multi-nationals where the company owners might not be citizens of the taxing country. The mere fact that Apple is headquartered in the US means relatively little by itself. Apple really is a bunch of companies under an umbrella company. Figuring out just how profitable the Italian subsidiary of Apple happens to be is a shockingly imprecise ex
Re:Predictable (Score:5, Insightful)
it remains to be said that the taxation system worldwide is completely out of control.
That depends massively on your point of view. Overall tax burdens in Scandinavian countries are reckoned to be among the worlds highest yet they also rank very highly for things like happiness, quality of life and medical care, things which are often moderated by tax-funded government schemes and departments. "Out of control" depends on what you think the taxation system should be achieving.
Bottom line is that it doesn't matter whether or not you like the tax system: if you operate in a country then you operate under their tax laws.
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Some people think they have a right to make a profit. They are wrong. We have a right to decide who gets to operate a business in our society and under what terms. If they don't want to contribute back to what we have built we have the right to deny them access.
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No, it's simply "pay your taxes or fuck off". Companies will, when forced to, always choose to pay their taxes because they can still make a profit, just less of a profit.
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No, it's simply "pay your taxes or fuck off". Companies will, when forced to, always choose to pay their taxes because they can still make a profit, just less of a profit.
Yes. They'll just increase prices, so you pay more and the extra money is sent to the government. Or they'll cut wages, so you earn less and the extra money is sent to the government.
If you want to give more money to the government, you could just send them a cheque and cut out the middle-man.
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They'll just increase prices, so you pay more and the extra money is sent to the government. Or they'll cut wages, so you earn less and the extra money is sent to the government.
Except there may be legislated minimums on pay rates, and increasing prices may result in a lower level of sales. Or it might not; some goods become more desirable as they become more expensive (typically because the real reason they're bought is to show that the purchaser can afford them; this is stupid, but definitely happens with some goods). But for all that, corporations have been acting like they believe it is their right to pay as little tax as they can get away with, doing tricks like setting the li
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If taxes are reduced, will companies pay better wages, decrease their prices, hire more people?
Hell no! They will still outsource everything, reduce wages and pay the upper management more for increasing profits.
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They'll just increase prices
Then they will lose custom and go out of business.
Or they'll cut wages
Then people will go and work elsewhere. Most of them already pay minimum wage or just a little bit over anyway (Apple, Starbucks etc.) so can't really go any lower.
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No you're not.
He's just saying that if a company does not exist for the betterment of society in general, then there's no point letting it exist at all.
This policy in fact aids capitalism, because it means companies must compete on the merits of their product, rather than their ability to find loopholes in the law.
For example, Amazon in the UK basically pays no tax but it does get the benefit of UK educated works and does get to use UK roads causing wear and tear and the publicly subsidised postal network.
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For example, Amazon in the UK basically pays no tax but it does get the benefit of UK educated works and does get to use UK roads causing wear and tear and the publicly subsidised postal network. This makes it a net drain on society (the jobs it creates and the taxes paid on those wages don't make up for it's overall cost to society) meaning
i hope you got some hard numbers supporting that notion that they are a net drain. What if the gains from reduced prices for consumers are in fact greater than the additional burden on the taxpayer?
Either way corps are pass-through entities, a fiction conjured by law. They don't live, they don't eat, they don't spend, they don't earn - people do. Chasing corps is an excercise in futility, a game of whack-a-mole.
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But there aren't reduced prices, since Amazon put the likes of Borders out of business it's book prices have become much more expensive.
It's a key part the problem, because Amazon engages in excessive tax avoidance, even those business that engage minor tax avoidance are outcompeted by it and when Amazon has seized a market because it's put the other major players out of business it just ups it's prices to whatever it wants.
This is precisely why France is putting protections in place for independent book re
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Why? More populous countries have the advantage of actually having enough people to really benefit from, say, mass transit. The economics of scale come into play. And if they work in the wrong direction you can always just divide the area up to scandinavian country sizes chunks that operate separately. What is the reason scandinavian model won't work with more people? And don't give me crap about "US is a huge, densely populaten country. So are scandinavian ones. On top of that they maintain their roads thr
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I see I was too late in my warning below.
Why? More populous countries have the advantage of actually having enough people to really benefit from, say, mass transit. The economics of scale come into play. And if they work in the wrong direction you can always just divide the area up to scandinavian country sizes chunks that operate separately. What is the reason scandinavian model won't work with more people? And don't give me crap about "US is a huge, densely populaten country. So are scandinavian ones. On top of that they maintain their roads through winter months and pretty much guarantee the availibility of electricity and internet to every place in their countries)
Your problem is that you are wrong. The US is not densely populated. It has densely populated cities, but it has many more towns, suburbs, and villages spread out over a good portion of a continent. Sweden in comparison has one densely populated area that covers the southern end of the country, four more small northern cities, and the rest is sparsely populated farmland or nearly empty mountains. So for a government program to reach most of the population, there is a
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Also, certain things don't scale well. It's conceivable the system that works so well in Scandinavia won't work in more populous countries.
Oh no, you aren't allowed to make this argument on Slashdot. For some reason, there is a visceral hatred from some people if you point that out.
For what it's worth, Sweden is Europe's 5th largest country, behind Russia, Ukraine, France and Spain, and is larger than California. The bulk of its 10 million people live in the southern third of the country, with a few northern cities dotting the eastern coast, and one inland. So government programs and businesses can serve most of the people quite easily.
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It is not a question of size it is question of trust, and ultimately corruption. The people need to trust the government and the government need trust the people and corrupt entities should feel ashamed of what they are doing, so society at least has the _appearence_ that corruption is abnormal (increasing trust, which lowers corruption which increases trust...)
who forgot ... (Score:2, Interesting)
I suspect the hottest question around Apple today is "who forgot to pay the Parliament's members bribes?" (or, at least, make the appropriate "campaign contributions", as we prefer to call them here in the USofA).
Wanted (Score:2)
Apple. Steal Different.
This is how you know (Score:2)
These things have been going on since forever and it has always been a well-known secret. But as times get increasingly desperate, governments and banks get increasingly worse about trying to squeeze money through taxes and fees respectively.
But this is how you know when things are about to turn bad. Just as with the 2008 collapse, weird things were going on with banks. "Economists" on the news would stand up there claiming everything is doing well and that anyone who says different is a nut job. And wh
common practice (Score:2)
Every large corporation does it, and there are tons of lawyers and tax consultants who specialise in exactly this kind of stuff.
It's probably the largest organized crime in the history of mankind, except that through lobbying or sometimes outright bribery, it's actually legal. Well, it's borderline legal, and you get cases like this every time a tax consultant became a tad too creative and crossed the line.
But it's theft, plain an simple, and every idiot who cheers the corporations should hold it for a seco
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It's not theft until it is an act defined as theft in the lawbooks! It's not a crime to follow the laws as they are written. If you want to outlaw the practice, then change the law.
If it is your position that you get to define what is & what isn't legal without using the law well then so does everyone else. It becomes normal for me to call you a rapist whether or not you have committed acts prohibited by law for example.
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If it is your position that you get to define what is & what isn't legal without using the law well then so does everyone else.
Legally speaking, you are entirely correct. However, we are not in a court of law, we are on an Internet blog. I can say "theft" here even if legally speaking it is tax evasion in the same way that corporate lawyers say "theft" or "piracy" in the media, but of course use the legally correct term "copyright infringement" when they are in front of a judge.
And yes, I am all for changing the laws. Don't forget that a lot of the stuff common today used to be illegal until neo-conservatives corrupted our governme
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so how about keeping it simple. Set the corporate tax to 10% no ifs no buts and get rid of all the bs. Why is there a corporate tax anyway? Corps are merely pass-through entities that can uproot and move with few strokes of a pen. Just wait at the exit, where the money gets passed to the flesh-and-bone people who actually get to spend it.
I've read somewhere that the compliance with the US tax code costs in aggregate something to the tune of 200 billion dollars. Nobody cares about that but that's countless m
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so how about keeping it simple. Set the corporate tax to 10% no ifs no buts and get rid of all the bs.
A professor of economics in Switzerland once did this excercise. He calculated what the tax level would be if there would be a flat income tax for everyone, at the same rate, with no exceptions.
It turned out that it was considerably below the level that most people pay today. How is that possible? Because the higher you get the more exceptions you can make use of.
A short-lived attempt was made to bring this revelation into politics and thus tax laws. It was extremely short-lived. I only heard about it secon
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You've got it easy. I live in Germany. There's a legend that half of the tax laws world-wide are german.
i'm not from the US :) Either way that legend is hard to believe. Reportedly the US code itself is 16k pages and with the IRS rulings you get to 73k o.O
According to the internet France is somewhere around 2k pages and i doubt Germany is different.
as for corps not being easy to uproot - well, what you say is probably true. Still, individuals don't hire whole departments of people whose only job is to shave off 1% here and there that will translate to hundreds of millions. With that kind of incentive you can
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so how about keeping it simple. Set the corporate tax to 10% no ifs no buts and get rid of all the bs..
But 10% of what? That's where the real issue is - what is a profit? Payroll taxes and dividend taxes are typically not an issue, it's easy to track money that actually goes to someone's pockets, it's what happens before it's actually given to someone, when it slushes around different country, that is the issue.
It sounds like the issue is where sales are made (Score:2)
They don't explain the nature of the tax dispute in any detail in the article. What they do say makes it sound like the source of the dispute is that people are ordering Apple products in Italy and the orders are being fulfilled by their subsidiary in Ireland. So the profits are getting booked in Ireland vs. Italy because that is the unit that made the sale. It goes on to say that there is a proposal by the government of Italy to force any company that advertises in and sells online in Italy to do its orde
Re:It sounds like the issue is where sales are mad (Score:4, Informative)
there's no issue about where the sales are made actually in this.
what they have done is artificially move the on-paper profits to the ireland based entity - which is owned by the same people. sales are done in italy, but they're claiming that they make no profit from the sales in italy because they (on paper only, mind you, it's not like they're actually ferrying the shit through ireland) buy the devices at retail price from the another entity in the business which is based in ireland.
why is it important to squash this practice eventually? well doh, there wouldn't be any taxes to be paid on any corporate profits stemming from sales anywhere else than ireland in europe if they don't do something about it(the alternative is in practicality to raise VAT so that all corporate profits taxing comes from VAT... which might not be that bad of an idea, alternatively force ireland to change it's laws to stop acting as a tax haven stopgap for this purpose)..
"ASI contracts with mainly Chinese companies to manufacture iPads and iPhones. ASI then sells these products to another Irish company which resells them to retail subsidiaries in Italy and other European countries.
The pricing of the inter-company transactions ensures that the lion's share of the profit ends up with ASI, the Senate report said. Low profits in countries like Italy mean low tax payments there."
Re:It is time to stop criminals. (Score:5, Insightful)
Criminal means convicted under the law - so it's precisely lobbying and other corruption which stops this behaviour being criminal.
There is no solution except a tempering of capitalism. If you allow businesses to become too powerful, they will take over governments. They have taken over governments.
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When you go to get a new driver's license, or vote, and they ask you if you want fries with that... it's time to move.
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Well, governments aren't going anywhere, and neither are powerful individuals, so either you temper them with a good dose of social democracy, or you lie down and give up.
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Social democracy isn't bolstering the power of government - the government is already large and powerful and in the hands of businesspeople. I am talking about change of control.
I don't know what you mean about not seeing companies as if they are enemies. I don't see any of this in terms of enmity or friendship, just power grabs.
Anyway, there's my dismissal of two of your straw men.
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Then you take advantage of that law of physics which says that vacuums are never filled.
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dunno if claiming as a church would go down in italy.
vatican has monopoly on that.
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What's the difference?
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What's the difference?
The amount of zeros in the payout.
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Well played.
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Sounds good, but the witless /. mods will strike me down with fiery vengeance for suggesting that all the teams are the same.
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Goomapplezon?
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No, Mapplezongle.
Any word ending in zongle must be good, yeah?
Actually, Mipplezongle. mmm, mipples.
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What about Goomipplezon?
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You named a completely different and unrelated company that has nothing to do with the story and still you get modded up.
Did you even read the article? The headline? Does this place consist of anything more than bots and chimps these days?
"The maker of the iPhone is the latest prominent corporation to become the target of a tax inquiry in Italy amid a global crackdown aimed at preventing companies such as Google, Amazon and others from avoiding taxes."
RTFA indeed.
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Thank you. I was hoping to be as obvious as possible without actually stating it, leaving the kids to fling shit until they worked out their mistake, but you said what needed to be said.
Google has already been the subject of investigations and multiple accusations in Italy [theguardian.com], and even TFA points out that new legislation to counteract fiscal dumping has been dubbed "the Google tax".
So, to reiterate: they're all the same.
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Yeah, yeah, we all realize that ACs are infinite around here. Tell us something we don't know.
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I don't know, why do economies based on ideology always fail and have to be rerouted back to mixed economy?
Why don't we ask the USA or Western Europe, since they've had some excellent recent experience with that problem.
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Because when the most important factor for making money is having money, you get a vicious circle where a small group ends up looting the entire economy, then using their newfound wealth to buy laws to prevent anyone from rising to challenge them. The scheme finally collapses when the plutocrats start believing their own lies about the system being just and fair, fail to pay enough for maintenance because the serfs deserve their fate, and cause an economic collapse - which is the phase we're in now. The nex
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No tax evasion here.
If the order is fulfilled from the servers that reside in Eire then you pay the VAT applicable for Eire.
There is a space on the VAT form to record the VAT you have collected on behalf of other EU countries.
I have the same gripe with Adobe. Buy a DVD and you pay 20% because it is shipped from Scotland(I'm in the UK). Download it and you pay 23% because their servers are in Eire.