Apple Argued That Buildings at Its Headquarters Were Worth $200, Not $1B, To Reduce Its Tax Bill: Report (sfchronicle.com) 536
Apple argued that buildings it owned around Cupertino, where it is headquartered, were only worth $200 instead of the $1 billion tax assessors deemed in 2015, according to appeals reviewed by the San Francisco Chronicle. From a report: The report characterized the dispute as part of an aggressive strategy by Apple to lower its tax bills. According to the Chronicle, Apple has 489 open appeals in tax disputes over property assessed at $8.5 billion in Santa Clara County, Calif., dating back to 2004. Those appeals include the $1 billion building assessed by tax officials, as well as another $384 million property that Apple also claims is worth $200. Apple is now valued at $1 trillion. It is also the county's biggest taxpayer, paying $56 million in the 2017-2018 tax year.
tax frauds (Score:5, Interesting)
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I know a guy who got a dog and called it a company mascot and had his company pay for all the pet supplies. People will try anything, it doesn't make it right.
Yeah but this is more like your mate having a dog then claiming its a hamster when it comes time to pay the vet bills.
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This is more like your buddy owning a zoo and sealife aquarium resort with trillion dollar valuation, and then claiming it's a pet hamster for tax purposes.
Seriously you can easily spend more than $200/year on a hamster, it's actually taking less piss than Apple is.
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ny kind of lying is wrong. I don't care if it is an ant, if you are making things up to save on taxes it's wrong.
I respect the fact you pay extra taxes; means less to pay for the rest of us.
But this is a negotiation over assessed value of property. I guess you've never had your house assessed out of the blue for far more than it's worth, and had to challenge it to get it back to something reasonable? Obviously, Apple doesn't expect the $200 to fly, it's just their response to what they see as an equally outrageous opening position by the government. Negotiations will proceed from there. Wish I had lawyers to play
Re:tax frauds (Score:5, Funny)
I respect the fact you pay extra taxes; means less to pay for the rest of us.
Everyone knows this is how it works too. There's a big pot and the government keeps collecting money until it fills up and after that no one has to pay anymore.
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The scale of that analogy is all wrong. It's more like having a horse and claiming it's a flea.
Re:tax frauds (Score:5, Funny)
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Oh, kind of like those folks with chihuahuas that think it's a breed of dog rather than rat? :)
hawk
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It isn't about being right, it is about being legal.
Morality and Legality are only loosely correlated.
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Do you want the different governments, or you, to be in the business of determining what companies need?
Funny the article leaves out the result when attac (Score:4, Informative)
This is about a property evaluation 2015, three years ago. I find it interesting that the Chronicle article this is based on, and all of the articles parroting the Chronicle, conveniently leave out the result. When reporting on "Apple appealed the county's assessment three years ago", wouldn't it make sense to tell us how the appeal turned out?
I see that the current tax assessment for the Apple headquarters building is $398,600,000. It may be that Apple's value is closer to correct than the number the county initially tried to get them for.
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As far as I know, no tax authority anywhere includes the chattels stored or used in a building when assessing that buildings value for municipal tax purposes. The idea being to make an estimate of the buildings likely value if sold on the open real estate market. The tax rate that then gets applied depends on the function (aka zoning) of that building. The tax rates a municipality comes up with depends on numerous factors, but one of the largest is how much of a bu
Re: Building Contents? (Score:3)
Re:Building Contents? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Building Contents? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:tax frauds (Score:5, Informative)
Off the top of my head, the City of Cupertino responds if there is a fire at Apple's $200 building and prevents it from being a complete loss by employing people to drive fire trucks that the City bought specifically for this purpose.
But hey, they are only out $200 right?
They also probably do other things like provide fresh water to that $200 building through convenient pipes, and take away sewage away through other convenient pipes. They have to maintain those pipes somehow, because pipes aren't magic objects that pop into existence where you need them, of the sizes needed.
Oh, and they maintain these crazy strips of asphalt that allow the workers to get to Apple's $200 building, so that Apple actually has people to design products to sell and make that Scrooge McDuck sized pile of money. Again, roads are not made of magic materials that you can wish into existence for free - it's real material that costs money to produce, and money to put that material in place. And more money to install traffic signals that keep the thousands of workers from that $200 building from having to deal with even worse traffic than they already do. And should a couple of those workers run their cars into each other on the City-owned roads, there's some more City employees that show up in City-owned vehicles (or perhaps from a City-contracted service) to provide emergency medical assistance. I think that one is called an "ambulance".
Please don't be daft.
They don't want to pay taxes (Score:5, Interesting)
and then they'll complain that the schools aren't producing the highly educated people they need to fill jobs, so they need more H1B visas. This same crap has been going on in Silicon Valley for decades.
Re:They don't want to pay taxes (Score:5, Interesting)
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This is also why public transit systems are crumbling.
The main reason public infrastructure in Cali is crumbling, despite the nations highest taxes, is pension costs. Infrastructure is a small cost by comparison. There are a couple ofcounties in Cali where pension costs are more than 100% of the budget. The cities tend not to be quite so strained, but pension costs are still typically more than half the budget.
Personally, I think sacrificing infrastructure because the public sector union negotiators were sharks is a bad plan, so I voted with my feet years a
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Back around 2000, many companies (Sun, Google) had their own shuttle services that went between the different corporate buildings and Caltrain stations. They were needed to allow employees to get between buildings for meetings and many didn't want to drive along freeways each day.
Google now runs luxury coach buses through San Francisco.
There was a big hoo-hah about how these buses were using bus-stops but not actually making any payments to the cities, so there was a deal made that involved Google making a
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Re:They don't want to pay taxes (Score:5, Interesting)
If anyone finds information on how Apple calculated that $200 valuation please share. I searched but found nothing. An AppleInsider article did say this though: "It is unclear if the $200 valuations are for hundreds of dollars or are in fact for $200 million." ( https://appleinsider.com/artic... [appleinsider.com] )
Re: They don't want to pay taxes (Score:2)
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Oh, you mean people who's best interests are in generating as much tax as possible?
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Oh, you mean people who's best interests are in generating as much tax as possible?
The public?
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Re:They don't want to pay taxes (Score:4, Insightful)
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Oh, you mean people who's best interests are in generating as much tax as possible?
Exactly.
Having said that, obviously Apple isn't really serious about the $200 figure; they are just giving themselves the maximum window within which to negotiate.
And so are the Assessors...
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I'm assuming Apple didn't insure their office for only $200.
Re:They don't want to pay taxes (Score:5, Informative)
So the assessors who collect taxes are able to determine the value w/o any process to appeal if they are wrong? I don't think so. The truth is someplace between $200 and $1B, the question is where that is.
Apple has their view, the tax collector theirs and what the poster was asking for was independent analysis of the building's true worth for the purposes of the property taxes.
You can barely get a half decent shed for $200 yet you think that might be a reasonable valuation for a whole fucking campus while google says the median for just a house in san francisco is $1.6million.?
Re:Depreciation of building vs. land (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, it isn't entirely insane, assuming this is talking about the Infinite Loop campus. Apple does not own the land under the building. It is owned by Sobrato, the development company on the corner. Apple merely has a 100-year lease on it. So if Apple decided to sell the buildings, absent some agreement by the landowner to allow the lease to be transferred, they would not be able to do so. Arguably, then, the buildings have zero value beyond what the landowner is willing to give them for them.
And even if the landowner agreed to a lease transfer, the buildings would still only have value if somebody else wants them as-is. The problem is, IL1's lobby area had serious mold problems fifteen years ago, particularly on the upper floors. I can't imagine it has gotten any better since then. If Apple ever left, there's a nonzero chance that the next company would decide to tear those buildings down rather than fix them.
It could well be that the expected amount of money that they could get for transferring the lease would not significantly exceed the amount of money they would have to spend bulldozing the old campus to make it ready for whatever company would take it over.
Mind you, I do think that $200 is a gross underestimate, but if the city valued it at a billion dollars, that's a laughable overestimate. There's no way you'd get anywhere close to that for a bunch of forty-year-old buildings, no matter how much history they might have.
And given that the original 100-year lease is almost halfway up, and at the end of that 100 years, the buildings potentially become a giant teardown liability unless the lessee is willing to move them somewhere else, the value of those buildings is at least arguably going to go *negative* at some point.
So really, the only reasonable way to value the property is to determine how much Apple would have to pay to move the employees that are currently in the Loop to other, rented office space, multiplied over the expected remaining life of the building — maybe ten years on the high side. If we assume that they stopped doubling and tripling up in IL offices after Apple Park opened, that's probably only a couple of thousand people. And assume that any new space would be high-density, open plan office space at 175 square feet per employee. Assuming about $4 per square foot per month times ten years, that's about $168 million. At $8 per square foot for demolition times 850,000 square feet, the buildings themselves are a $6.8 million liability, so its value is really closer to $160 million. Seems like a much more plausible number than a billion, which would basically require assuming that Apple will continue using those buildings as-is for the remainder of the hundred-year lease.
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I'm basing this on the fact that buildings depreciate over 40 years for a reason. That's the expected life of the building. The buildings in question are now forty years old. So from a value perspective, these buildings are bulldozer fodder. They'r
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Re:They don't want to pay taxes (Score:4, Insightful)
Worst case of balance fallacy I've ever seen. The $200 valuation is plainly ludicrous (most of the windows in any of those buildings would cost over $200 to replace) and the $1B valuation is likely close to correct judging by the work history of the government tax assessors and the cost of other tech megacorp campuses.
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I read this and I thought that $200 has to be a misunderstanding. I read the article and it repeats $200. I still think there's an error in reporting here and that Apple is valuing the property and building at $200M. That at least seems within the realm of sensibility because there's no way accountants or assessors at Apple would value the campus at $200.
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Are you stupid? You know how much it cost to construct a building. You know how much they paid for the property.
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How much you pay doesn't equal it's value.
That's exactly what it equals!
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My value and your value for a thing might be different and that value might change over time but if money is handed over in exchange for a thing then a value has been agreed.
No, a price has been agreed. All you can say about value based on that transaction is that, at the time, the seller valued the thing less than the money while the buyer valued the thing more than the money.
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How much you pay doesn't equal it's value.
That's exactly what it equals!
Yep. In a free market system the value of goods or services is whatever the buyer is willing to pay and whatever the seller is willing to accept. Economics 101.
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How much you pay doesn't equal it's value.
That's exactly what it equals!
How much you pay is *one* value -- but not necessarily the fair market value. You could pay $1M for a home and discover that it's on an unstable hillside and you need to tear it down. Or you could buy a $1M house from your grandma for $200, but that doesn't mean that the house is worth $200.
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Yeah I tend to be a bit blunt. Smart people are often more-vulnerable to confidence tricks because they think they can finesse their way around the plot and get reeled in; of course, you can always learn to deal with those little details with all the finesse of a brick instead of trying to show off how very smart you are.
This is a dispute between two parties who each have a conflict of interest; get the brick.
Re: They don't want to pay taxes (Score:2)
Not trusting anybody is just as stupid as trusting everybody.
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You're obviously not a lawyer.
Also: I'm working on elections security as a side hobby these days. Do you know why I've designed an integrity model that opens up any and all tampering to discovery by literally anyone in the world, at any time, even long after the election has ended?
Tax assessors are local government officials. The local government makes revenue from taxes. This is an obvious conflict of interest. Do you trust the government [wikipedia.org], or do you demand transparency?
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Re: They don't want to pay taxes (Score:5, Insightful)
No, I'm suggesting the possibility of things like collusion exists. Kickbacks are more the sort of thing you get when dealing with an independent third party (a government official pays the private contractor a little bonus).
Historically, there has been a lot of elections fraud; that doesn't mean every election is stolen, even if it looks like it might have been, but it sure as hell means you don't trust the board of elections, voting machine manufacturers, political parties, or anyone else to act in good faith. The same is true when a state wants to tax somebody on a property they value at a really high number and there is a dispute over whether it's actually a fair market assessment: show me why that's fair if you want me to believe it.
It's not one-way, either. Do you know what my tax assessment is? $1,000 on land, $2,000 on my house. The city is artificially lowering cost-of-living in my area by dishonestly assessing our property. Because of certain state laws, I'm actually able to go back and force the city to not charge me property tax for another few decades if they try to raise this, too--which is good, because plenty of my neighbors are too poor to afford sudden water bill and property tax hikes, and they have a defense against that sort of thing if the city tries to run them out.
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To be fair, I don't trust either side. Show me the valuation. Why is it worth $1Bn, or $200?
Keep offering them money until they give you the keys. My bet is you'll be a lot closer to a billion, probably significantly over. I bet they didn't pay less than $200 for a bin that has the apple logo on it.
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The building itself might be worth only $200 million as real estate (it's a big building, dude); as an operations headquarters, it's worth much more to Apple but not to anyone else. Its property valuation is pointedly not its strategic valuation.
It's more like have a bunch of people bid on it and see where they stop. It'll probably be less than Apple is willing to take or else Apple would sell the building and move somewhere else.
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We know the type of property, the size, the cost to rebuild, the usual cost for office space of that size and in that area, and so forth. We can make analogous estimates.
Estimating is an entire technical field, and is a knowledge area for project managers.
Re:They don't want to pay taxes (Score:5, Funny)
No need for a valuation. I'll offer Apple 100 times their own valuation. If what they say is true, they should accept my offer.
$250 (Score:5, Funny)
Re:$250 (Score:5, Insightful)
It would be funny to have the local municipality come in and take the property though eminent domain using Apple's valuation. I am sure the county or state could use the extra office space.
Re:$250 (Score:5, Funny)
It would be funny to have the local municipality come in and take the property though eminent domain using Apple's valuation. I am sure the county or state could use the extra office space.
They could be extra generous and give apple $400 so they can replace with two!
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It would be funny to have the local municipality come in and take the property though eminent domain using Apple's valuation.
Eminent domain requires justly compensating Apple for the loss of their property: not paying Apple the Proposed Tax Assessment value or the Fair Market value, that's not necessarily sufficient for just compensation. Even if the market considers their property worth only $5, and they might, if for example the property has special value to Apple which all other potential busi
Re:$250 (Score:5, Informative)
If both the buyer and seller agree on a valuation, that would be just compensation. Your example is based on the property having special value for Apple. Yet Apple themselves estimated its value as $200, which is their legal admission that it has very little value to them, special or not.
apply similar valuations to apple products (Score:2, Insightful)
apply a similar steep discounted valuation, to any apple product, to arrive at its true worth as a product.
rest is hype and manipulation of herd behavior.
apple product user = herd animal with low agency
Sounds good to me (Score:5, Insightful)
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Don't be stupid. In typical Apple style they'll want a lot more profit from that sale.
I say offer them 600 dollars just to be sure.
There's a simple solution to this crap... (Score:5, Interesting)
Let people set their own valuations, but the valuation is also a public tender for sale at that price.
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Here's the problem with that: my house is worth probably less then apple headquarters. I don't want somebody to show up and buy it out from under me against my will at any reasonable price. My house is not for sale: why should it be for sale at all times just for a tax evaluation?
Re:There's a simple solution to this crap... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Here's the problem with that: my house is worth probably less then apple headquarters. I don't want somebody to show up and buy it out from under me against my will at any reasonable price. My house is not for sale: why should it be for sale at all times just for a tax evaluation?
Yeah but you can't really say it's only worth three dollars but its not for sale, it's the reasonable price bit. Also what kind of house do you live in if you think its only 'probably' worth less than apple HQ?
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That approach sounds clever at first, but think about it for much longer and it starts to stink.
Most obviously, it would give the rich a means to punish anyone poorer than them for any reason. For instance, suppose you saw that Paris Hilton was in the news again for doing something you didn't approve of and you decided to say something rude about her. Suppose that she happened to become aware of your comment and decided that she didn't much care for it. With the Hilton fortune at her beck-and-call, she coul
Lie on taxes (Score:5, Insightful)
If an individual lies on taxes, they go to jail.
If a corporation lies on taxes, they get rewarded.
Re:Lie on taxes (Score:4, Funny)
Yeah, because corporations aren't people.
Wait...didn't the Supreme Court....hmmmm....
$200 seems to be Apple's lucky number (Score:2)
What an amazing coincidence that two properties, one assessed at over double the value of the other, are both only worth $200 according to Apple.
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Sounds like Apple should hire fewer lawyers (Score:2)
and more engineers.
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Re:Well, property taxes really are bullshit (Score:5, Informative)
Tax on the poor? Sure, but the poor pay property taxes too. You think rental owners don't pass that onto their tenants? The renting poor pay a share of property taxes too and have to do so even in bad times. Switching that to sales and income taxes would at least let the poor to reduce that equivalent tax payment when things get really tough (as you can't tax non-existent income and they can stop spending on non-essentials)
And you really think that, if property taxes are abolished, landlords will actually drop the prices correspondingly? And stop spending on non-essentials? The reason people argue that sale taxes are regressive is that the poor are already spending less of their money on non-essentials than wealthier people because most of their money already goes towards essentials. increase sales taxes and for a lot of people the situation doesn't become "oh, guess I have to hold onto my iphone for another year", it becomes "can I afford to eat dinner today".
Re:Well, property taxes really are bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
They are the single most "regressive" tax we have
No, sales taxes are far more regressive.
Property tax: poor person lives in cheap house, pays little in property taxes (directly or via rent). Rich person lives in expensive mansion, pays lots in property taxes.
Sales tax: poor person buys a lawnmower, pays sales tax. Rich person hires a lawn service, directly pays $0 in sales tax. The sales tax for the service's much more expensive lawnmower is spread over all of their customers, resulting in less sales tax per customer.
The poor and middle class tend to buy goods, which are subject to sales tax. The wealthy tend to buy services, which are not subject to sales taxes. Sales tax for the goods that are bought by those services is spread over more people, resulting in an overall lower sales tax rate.
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False [itep.org].
But what we really need are fees proportional to the land parcel's burden on the city. For example, a property with a long street frontage requires more city money to maintain the street, the sidewalk, the sewers, and the trees, so a street frontage fee would be appropriate and give the poor a new opportunity to save money on their living expenses by living in a building with a narrow front.
Replacing property taxes with property burden fee
Apple didn't exactly say it's HQ was worth $200 (Score:5, Informative)
If you read the article, Apple didn't say that its HQ was worth $200. From SF Chronicle article:
Some claims reflect extreme differences in estimated values. In one appeal filed in 2015, Apple said that a cluster of properties in and around Apple Park
in Cupertino that the assessor valued at $1 billion was worth just $200. In another, property that the assessor valued at $384 million was, in Appleâ(TM)s view, worth $200, according to an appeal application
What are these properties? I don't know. I'd have to look at the appeal. It could be that the dispute is not over the HQ.
#clickbait (Score:2, Interesting)
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If you're the richest company in the world and are claiming an entire office is worth $200, and you don't see a problem with that, I'm not sure I can do anything to convince you otherwise.
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Arguing that your property is worth less than what the government is estimating, for the purpose of trying to lower your property taxes, is standard procedure everywhere. Apple doing it doesn't make this tech news.
Arguing that a building appraised at $1m is really only worth $750-800k, ok. Fair enough. Arguing a set of properties appraised at $1b is only really worth $200? That's tax fraud. A couple percent off is fine, but not 99.99998%
There is only one real law in the world. (Score:3, Insightful)
Everything else is just talk.
Cool (Score:2)
Apple argued that buildings it owned around Cupertino, where it is headquartered, were only worth $200 instead of the $1 billion tax assessors deemed in 2015,
If that's the case, I'd be willing to buy it from them at double the value they're claiming it to be worth. That should make them happy as they'll make double what it's worth to them.
But ... (Score:2)
Pay your taxes Apple (Score:2, Insightful)
Expropriation (Score:2)
Shareholder value (Score:2)
How are they depreciating it? (Score:5, Insightful)
If Apple says the building is only worth $200, then their tax deduction for building depreciation over the next 39 years can only be a maximum of $5.13 per year. So either they pay the property tax on a $1 billion building (which at Prop 13's 1% cap and utilities of about 1% works out to about $20 million/yr in taxes), or they lose an annual tax deduction of ($1 billion) / (39 years) = $25.6 million (which at the 35% corporate tax rate would be $8.96 million/yr).
I suspect what's going on is some accountant did this math and decided it would be cheaper to give up building depreciation in exchange for a lower tax assessment. But now their gig has been discovered and they're at risk of both losing the building depreciation tax deduction, while having it assessed at its full value for property taxes. If that's not what they're doing, and they're audaciously depreciating the building by $25.6 million on this year's taxes while simultaneously claiming it's only worth $200 for property tax assessment, then this is simple. They've legally admitted to the IRS that the building is worth $1 billion. Claiming to the assessor that it's only worth $200 constitutes fraud and possibly perjury.
A simple legislative solution (Score:3)
A simple legislative solution to address some egregious property tax assessment appeals would be to mandate that when submitting a proposed valuation, the taxing body has the right to immediately purchase the property for some TBD multiplier of your submitted valuation. I suspect that multiplier should be in the 3-5x range.
Obviously there'd need to be reasonable allowances for time to move out, but the cost of moving should be covered by the multiplier.
If Apple wants to contend that a chunk of property is only worth $200, great! I'm sure the city can find $1000 to properly compensate them for that property and the cost of vacating it. Perhaps the city can find something more beneficial to do with that property that might provide more tax revenue.
Does the tax bill exist? (Score:3)
I was curious of online property tax for the new Apple campus in Cupertino, I found APN for that location 316-07-049 SCCtax webpage returns "No bills found for property 31607049 in fiscal year 2019." I did find this from https://www.sccassessor.org/in... [sccassessor.org]
Current Information
Document No: 21115138 Document Type: GRANT DEED
Transfer Date: 3/18/2011 Tax Default Date: N/A
VALUE INFORMATION (Assessed Information as of 6/30/2018)
Real Property
Land: $439,402,436
Improvements: $398,600,000
Total: $838,002,436
Business
Fixtures: $0
Structure: $0
Personal Property: $0
Total: $0
Exemptions
Homeowner:$0
Other: $0
Total: $0
Net Assessed Value
Total: $838,002,436
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I forgot to look at payment history, here it is for 19400 HOMESTEAD RD CUPERTINO
My Payments Payment Posted
$4,794,797.44 03/23/2018
$4,794,797.44 12/11/2017
$4,020,990.67 03/22/2017
$4,020,990.67 11/30/2016
$6,082,296.32 03/10/2016
$6,082,296.32 11/24/2015
Man, look at that tax rate! (Score:4, Informative)
It is also the county's biggest taxpayer, paying $56 million in the 2017-2018 tax year.
Let's see. Revenue of $229 billion for 2017 [statista.com] $.056 billion/ $229.23 billion = 0.02446% tax rate. Most individuals pay between 20-50% of their income (depending on the country). This is even more loony than the $200 campus. Can I buy your campus for $300 Apple -- you can make a 50% profit!
Re: Jail time for tax fraud,right? (Score:2)
The whole point of incorporation is to make it so the individuals in the corporation are not liable for this sort of thing. As long as the blame can be spread, no one is to blame.
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Apple can go piss off a wind-swept roof, facing the wind, and pay their property tax bill just like I do.
So you just blindly pay your taxes on the assessed value? I don't. I review my assessed value verses market conditions when they send me their proposed valuation every year and IF I felt the value they had was out of line, I'd be objecting. I suggest all property owners do the same thing.
So all this really is, is Apple contesting their assessed value. $1B seems a bit steep, and $200 seems very low, but this is just a negotiation in the starting phases. They will reach a value that's in-between the two e
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All we have here is somebody trying to make Apple look bad by releasing their bargaining position so it gets tried in the press, which may be fair, but unfortunate that things get decided like this in the press. The appeals process should run it's course, unhindered by such interference by the likes of the local news paper.
Right.... Apple has the right to appeal for FAIR UNBIASED due process regarding the assessed value.. The newspapers are unfairly meddling which might result in anti-Apple bias in the
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Companies and people have a sole duty to lower there tax bill as much as possible. If it isn't written in law do not give Uncle Sam anymore than the law says.
Yeah, you're going to need to save all that money to pay the toll for every road you need to use. Extend your medical insurance to cover police and fire, pay the electric, water, gas and every other service that relies on public utilities etc etc. But if people did pay what the law says things would mostly be fine but when they lie, cheat and steal to reduce that bill, especially when you're literally one of the richest companies in the world and are doing nothing but hoarding wealth. Also I think you need