Apple's UK Stores Paid $7.7M in Tax Despite $1.7B in Sales (yahoo.com) 153
The UK retail arm of Apple paid just $7.7m in taxes last year despite raking in almost $1.7bn in sales, according to the company's latest accounts. From a report: Revenue at Apple Retail UK, which operates 38 of the company's stores in the UK, rose by more than 15% in the 12 months to 28 September. But after costs and expenses of around $1.7bn, the firm reported before-tax profits of just $47m, slashing its tax bill significantly. In a statement describing itself as "the largest taxpayer in the world," Apple said that it always paid the taxes that it owed.
You know what they do with their leftover money? (Score:5, Insightful)
They pay legislatures to write tax code that allows them to pretend their profits are 1% of what they actually are.
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They pay legislatures to write tax code that allows them to pretend their profits are 1% of what they actually are.
Right. Because their profits are obviously 100% of their sales.
It is amazing how their employees work for free, they pay no rent, and it costs nothing to manufacture the products they sell.
Apple sells a laptop for $2k (Score:2)
As for their labor, there's a handful of well paid engineers and programmers. The rest is either machines, borderline slave labor, or actual slave labor [businessinsider.com].
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As for their labor, there's a handful of well paid engineers and programmers.
No there isn't. These are RETAIL STORES. They neither make nor program devices. They just sell and service them.
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beating out Android's entire market share.
No, just no. They do NOT have >50% marketshare in any major market in the world. Heck even in the very, very rich UAE they only have 27%. The highest they have ever achieved that I can find is 49% in the US in Q4 2019, over the year they averaged closer to 40%. In every other market they have significantly less than they do in the US. Now if you want to talk about profits or revenue, there they probably dominate completely, but in units shipped they are the sim
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>beating out Android's entire market share.
no.
They beat the *profits* of android combined, last I heard, with much smaller share.
And the same thing for getting paid for apps; the combined iOS sales were larger (again, last numbers I paid attention to) than android combined.
hawk
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and the dominant seller of phone handsets, beating out Android's entire market share.
Not even close. Android phones outsell the iPhones 3-to-1. https://www.macworld.co.uk/fea... [macworld.co.uk]
Come on, something funny is going on (Score:2)
Right. Because their profits are obviously 100% of their sales.
Clearly not, but for a highly profitable company like Apple I have an extremely hard time believing that their profits are only 2.7% of their sales. We need to start taxing global companies by calculating what share of their global profits derives from the revenue in a particular country. This will prevent the shifting of profits to tax havens.
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Apple doesn't pay sales tax, consumers do.
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A distinction that makes no difference.
It absolutely does.
If nothing else, right now a portion of the VAT payment goes to the EU. If Apple paid that same amount of money as tax on profits the money would stay in the UK.
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They pay legislatures to write tax code that allows them to pretend their profits are 1% of what they actually are.
Right. Because their profits are obviously 100% of their sales.
It is amazing how their employees work for free, they pay no rent, and it costs nothing to manufacture the products they sell.
https://www.stock-analysis-on.... [stock-analysis-on.net]
They had a net profit margin of over 21% in 2019. If that figure applies to the UK it suggests Apple is paying around 2.2% tax on their profits.
Well that certainly seems fair. /s
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If that figure applies to the UK it suggests Apple is paying around 2.2% tax on their profits.
It does not apply to the UK since Apple devices are neither designed nor manufactured there.
Operating a retail store adds very little to net profit. In fact, I am surprised their retail outlets generate any profit at all because of the service costs.
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Apple retail stores are where they keep the reality distortion field generators. They serve a very profitable purpose.
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How are they the most profitable company in the world if they aren't making any profits...
They are not a British company, so their global profits are irrelevant.
Even if they were a British company, it would be irrelevant because the UK, unlike America, does not tax extraterritorial profit.
What is the profit of their retail stores the UK?
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If only that were true. They do not pay off the legislatures with their profits..... they pay them off and it is considered an operating expense and therefore not taxed.
That is how companies game the system. Traditionally, operating expenses are subtracted from gross profits (pre-tax) which result in net profits. If Apple sets up a tax shelter in Jamaica and transfers their patents to the Jamaica company.... they can literally pay themselves licensing fees using pre-tax money as an operating expense whic
Re: You know what they do with their leftover mone (Score:3)
Then the solution is getting rid of intellectual property. Simple as that. Get rid of patents, copyrights, trade secrets, and trademarks. This problem will be solved. At the other end of the spectrum you can look at commodities like sugar and see how well the tax revenue aligns with local support.
Tax is a cost. If one place charges less than another for the same thing, then it's almost unethical, and certainly foolish to shop at the more expensive place. So you shop your IP at low tax locations that sel
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I would argue it is immoral, but not unethical. The accountants and lawyers that perform and approve these creative practices generally have personal ethical standards they are held to. These are ethics applied to their person, not the corporation for which they work. Their job is to ride the line as close to "illegal" as possible without going over.... too much.
The laws in countries were designed to permit the creative accounting practices.
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UK legislation and tax requirements are readily available online, can you point to the relevant bits that Apple "bought"?
Tax requirements for all businesses operating within the UK are here: https://www.gov.uk/topic/busin... [www.gov.uk]
The manuals that the HMRC uses to determine taxation are here: https://www.gov.uk/government/... [www.gov.uk]
All UK legislation is here: http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ [legislation.gov.uk]
Go for it.
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You pay sales tax on sales. If they only payed 7.7m for sales tax, they have a good point. If the tax is tax on profits, then don't list the 1.7B sales number because it is not relevant. The tax on profits is only paid on the profits.
Another way to look at it. You sell an iphone for 1000. Apple makes it and delivers to stores for 900. When sold, Apple makes a profit. But the Apple Store itself also makes a profit. How do you divide up that 100 in profit - does the store pay tax on all of that, or
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You sell an iphone for 1000. Apple makes it and delivers to stores for 900. When sold, Apple makes a profit. But the Apple Store itself also makes a profit. How do you divide up that 100 in profit
Well, 100 of it goes to the store to cover the store's running costs, with any remaining being the store's profit.
Apple's profit is within the 900 they charged the store for the phone.
Manipulative Nonsense (Score:4, Informative)
>The UK retail arm of Apple paid just $7.7m in taxes last year despite raking in almost $1.7bn in sales,
Taxes are on profits. not sales. This is clickbait material designed to cause outrage by presenting information in a manipulative way.
Apple shifts their profits around (Score:2, Insightful)
Imagine if you could earn your money in San Francisco or NY (the nice parts, yes there's slums everywhere, in the old days we called those "servant quarters") but pay taxes like you lived in Alabama. You'd have the benefits of living in a well maintained city w/o paying the costs.
Of course somebody has to pay those costs. That somebody is you and me.
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Yes... but you are kind of forced into this type of behavior by the laws. (It will be interesting to see how Brexit eventually impacts this, specific to the UK.) For the EU, the whole point is for the block to be treated as a whole, and one nation is going to benefit disproportionately with an entity that is successful across the block. Likewise, it is perfectly logical that there is a base of EU operations for a foreign company (and logical that it would be in a low-tax jurisdiction within the EU).
Beyond
If the UK wanted Apple to pay taxes (Score:2)
It's surprising it was profitable at all. (Score:2)
I'm actually surprised that there was a profit, assuming that apple store pays apple the same price as other retailers fore product.
If you go into Wally-world or such, and buy at list price, the gross margin is something silly-small like 1% or 2% (at least for the iOS stuff).
They don't carry them to make money on the sales, but to get people into the store and buy other stuff with higher margins. I think the loss to theft *completely* wipes out the profits for iPhones and iPads.
I've always assumed the a t
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Do you think Apple's profit margins are that low that they would end up only paying 0.45% tax on those sales?
Apple, the richest company in the world, makes that little margin?
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If Apple operated completely and entirely in the UK, with zero costs elsewhere, no transfer pricing and no way of mitigating their UK tax bill, but kept their current global profit margins, they'd still only pay under 3.4% tax on sales.
So while I do think 0.45% is too low, it may legitimately be a rounding error away from the correct rate.
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Taxes are on profits. not sales. This is clickbait material
I agree with you were it not for the fact that the only reason Apple a company with famously high margins on goods only has low profits due to accounting tricks.
It's isn't clickbait when the fact that profits are low is the the entire point under contention.
Re: Manipulative Nonsense (Score:4, Interesting)
If you got outraged, then you were manipulated exactly like the article author wanted to happen.
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Apple does evade taxes. But in this particular case they are NOT evading these particular taxes. Outrage is due where outrage is owed, and it's not owed in this case.
It's like blaming the mob boss for showing up to church when it's the one thing they may actually be doing right.
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You go to jail for tax evasion. I haven't heard of anyone from Apple UK going to jail. So I conclude there is no evidence of tax evasion.
Apple are rich enough to avoid gaol. See for example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
illegal tax evasion on a massive scale.
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Actually, it used to be that "tax avoidance" was legal but "tax evasion" was illegal -- here in New Zealand.
Yet now I see people being prosecuted for both.
A couple of orthopedic surgeons here structured their company and their income (without breaking any specific tax laws) so as to minimize their tax liabilities but were prosecuted for "tax avoidance" and had to pay a huge fine.
So it seems that, at least in this part of the world, there is zero distinction between the two categories of tax minimization.
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Reading the case, it looks like the difference is that had they been evading tax, they'd have been fined, had to pay the tax and potentially gone to prison.
Instead they were deemed to be liable to tax on a higher level of income than they had declared (due to their corporate structures) and were asked to pay the additional tax thus due.
There is definitely a distinction there.
Interesting (Score:2)
So the story here is that Apple is paying too much, compared with other corporate behemoths that pay even a lower percentage? I'd be outraged, but this is the US, after all...
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I'd be outraged, but this is the US, after all...
The first two words of the summary are the UK
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American companies, American rules, or something like that...
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UK based stores selling products in the UK, so UK rules. The UK does not tax Apple based upon its world wide profits, it taxes it based on its operations within the UK. In this particular story, it is only talking about a subset of Apple operations, it's retail stores.
The story is clickbait, using misleading numbers. Read the details, realize what taxes are paid on, and what taxes are already paid (ie, 20% of that 1.7B was already collected through VAT).
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(ie, 20% of that 1.7B was already collected through VAT)
No. I just made the same assumption in a calculation when replying to someone else, but went and sanity checked.
Revenue (or Income) in financial accounts is declared excluding VAT. So you'd add 20% to the £1.4bn to get the actual figure for till receipts.
Isn't the angle here, what are this costs and exp. (Score:2)
But after costs and expenses of around $1.7bn
That means that the amount of tax Apple owed originally was a bit higher than 1.7 billion.
But retail stores are expensive, staff is expensive, upkeep is expensive, rent (especially where Apple stores are) is VERY expensive.
It is reasonable to write real expense off, so if they really had that much in expenses, then the amount of remaining tax Apple is paying is reasonable.
So really what someone should be doing here, is looking into what the expenses ARE, to see i
I do not really see a problem (Score:5, Informative)
Do not be fooled by Total Revenue #'s (like the activist, press and politicians do when they want to create outrage), it is gross revenue (revenue minus all cost and expenses) that is taxed.
Just my 2 cents
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gross revenue->net revenue my error
Re:I do not really see a problem (Score:4, Informative)
The problem is they're shifting the definition (Score:2)
Here's the problem (Score:5, Interesting)
47 million profit (net income) from 1.7 billion in earnings is a profit margin of 47 / 1700 = 2.76%.
If you look at Apple's income statement [yahoo.com], you see that their declared net income for 2019 is $55.3 billion on $260.2 billion in revenue. For a profit margin of 55.3 / 260.2 = 21.3%
So somehow, globally 21.3% of the revenue Apple takes in becomes profit. But in UK stores only 2.76% of the revenue they take in becomes taxable profit. Either their UK stores are monumentally expensive to operate. Or somehow they're padding their UK stores' expenses to lower the stores' profit in paper, to lower their taxes. Probably some sort of licensing deal with a division in Ireland. e.g. Their Ireland-based licensing division charges the stores several hundreds of millions of pounds for using the Apple logo. That shifts much of the profit from the UK stores to Ireland, where they pay a lower corporate tax rate.
(And I say this as someone who doesn't believe in taxing corporations - it violates the principle of no taxation without representation, and whether you individual income, sales, or corporate profit, you're taxing the same financial transactions so they have the same net effect. But until I can convince enough people of that to change tax law, companies should abide by current tax law.)
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Apple made ~1.7b had cost and expenses of ~1.7b leaving a profit of ~47m. Which it seems UK tax law says the taxes are 7.7m or ~16.3%.
Do not be fooled by Total Revenue #'s (like the activist, press and politicians do when they want to create outrage), it is gross revenue (revenue minus all cost and expenses) that is taxed.
Just my 2 cents ;)
The real shocker is that Apple decided that $7.7 million was the right amount to pay. The accountants and transfer pricing specialist could have picked any number. Somehow, they thought that $7.7 million was better than $0. Both numbers invite pubic scorn, but the $0 number is better for the bottom line. Seems like Apple is not thinking clearly.
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Apple made ~1.7b had cost and expenses of ~1.7b
You only don't see a problem because you think that Apple is telling the truth when they said they had costs of 1.7bn
What about VAT (Score:2, Informative)
Re:What about VAT (Score:5, Informative)
The VAT is paid by the customer, not by the company. The company just receives VAT from customers and pays their share of added value (which is little anyway).
Time to put a sales/vat tax on all imports, (Score:2)
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VAT was already paid for all of those Apple sales in the UK. You want to pay VAT twice?
Dishonest article (Score:2)
What a dishonest! Apple's sales were "almost £1.4bn" and their "costs and expenses of around £1.35bn" so they barely made a profit. Corporate income taxes are paid on profits, so if they made a small profit, they also pay small corporate income taxes.
Of course, Apple also pays other taxes - sales taxes, payroll taxes, property taxes, etc., which the article dishonestly omits, lying by claiming that Apple's taxes paid were only the tax on their profits and not all of the other taxes paid.
If there
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And they always go for the shock value of revenue numbers, with have little to do with taxes.
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If apple and others arenâ(TM)t paying taxes, it us because inland revenue made a sweetheart corrupt deal. The IRS does so all the time by awarding politically motivated bogus nonprofit charters. For instance in Alabama three priests in separate cases were using the church to run drugs, but their charter is still in p
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This isn't some odd dutch irish sandwich situation, though, where a big multinational is gaming tax laws (not making a valud judgement on that, jsut saying). This is retail sales of end products. While Apple is undoubtedly optimizing things, this is not "paying taxes on the sum value of the goods" but "paying taxes on the profit taken at this level of the supply chain" which is something else, entirely.
Factory sells goods to distribution, which sells goods to store, which sells to consumer. That "Apple" o
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The claimed retail markup is lower than any retail store I have ever heard of anywhere in the world. That step alone should have a lot more profit (by an order of magnitude). Unless of course the company is intentionally shifting some of that profit to another jurisdiction by artificially making the retail store pay more than they otherwise would for their products to move the profit to a lower tax jurisdiction... no, that couldn't possibly be what's happening here, I mean every big company does this, but t
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The claimed retail markup is lower than any retail store I have ever heard of anywhere in the world.
Apparently, the retail markup on iphones (for large retailers, who should be getting the best deal from Apple) is 4.5% [moneycontrol.com]. Since (as you point out) it doesn't benefit Apple to give themselves margin at the point of sale, I wouldn't expect they're charging their retail stores less than they are the market in general. So if the store's whole busines model is selling itoys, they're break even propositions, since 4.5% margin is barely going to cover overhead. The reason this isn't a (big) problem for other reta
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Well, if they are paying everything they are legally bound to pay...what is the story here?
See your next sentence.
If folks don't like how much people/companies pay in taxes per the law, then change the law.
So at least part of the the story is that laws allow Apple to get away with this. Without the story (and others like it), what would be prompting people to try to change the law?
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So at least part of the the story is that laws allow Apple to get away with this.
Get away with what? You make it sound as if the company is doing something wrong.
Wrong like adultery (Score:4, Insightful)
Get away with what? You make it sound as if the company is doing something wrong.
They are. They are using legal loopholes to avoid paying tax in the countries where they make their money in favour of shifting the profits to countries where they make almost no money but which have very low tax rates.
Like adultery, it may be entirely legal but it is morally very wrong and likely eventually to lead to painful legal proceedings and/or law changes which will probably be bad for the country and the company.
Re:Wrong like adultery (Score:4, Interesting)
So don't blame Apple -- who are simply doing what they are legally entitled to do... blame the wooden-head politicians who've made laws that allow this type of loophole.
Everyone (especially those politicians who are actually responsible) love to blame Apple but Apple are simply adhering to their legal obligation to ensure the best return for shareholders. If they *didn't* take advantage of what the law allows they would be ethically in the wrong because they would be cheating shareholders out of the dividends they are lawfully due.
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The sales tax has been paid on that 1.4B of sales, but this story is not about sales. The story is about their tax on their profit, and sales minus expenes is about 50M. We don't see the full numbers here, but the story focuses on the 1.4B which is irrelevant.
So they paid 7.7M in taxes on ~50M of net income. Corporate tax rates in UK is about 19%. So it seems Apple retail paid roughly the normal amount of taxes that it owed, 15% vs 19%, we don't see all the fiddly bits in the tax forms account for that
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Re:So? (Score:5, Insightful)
Answer his question- what are they "getting away with"...
They are getting away with arranging their affairs so as not to support, through taxes, the societies from which their income is derived. If you think the law should be changed to prevent that (I'm guessing that you don't) then you will think there's a problem with that. I'm pretty sure that he got that - and I'm surprised if you haven't. I really don't think he was aiming to ask "what is it that they're doing". He was (at best) suggesting that it isn't problematic.
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So, let me ask you.
With your personal (a
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For that 1.4B in sales, for which there were 1.35B in expenses, Apple also claims to have invested 2B in the UK and has 325,000 employees there. The stores themselves seem like they're paying their fair share if the expenses numbers are correct. But that is not the entirety of Apple in the UK either.
This only becomes an issue when people look at the tiny picture, and wonder why the 38 individual Apple retail stores aren't paying their fair share from the entirety of Apple's international profits. Further,
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Somebody is doing something wrong. But it's not the person following the tax laws. It's the person who is writing sweetheart tax laws at the behest of the first person.
Also note that Right/wrong very frequently do not equal legal/illegal, they are 2 very distinct concepts.
So law requiring they pay US instead is dumb (Score:2)
So maybe fix the laws?
Currently, the US has a different law than pretty much every other country. US-based businesses that make money in other countries have to pay tax on it even if they've already paid tax in the country where they made the money. So if they recognize the profit in the UK, which would be the most logical and convenient, they get to pay taxes in both countries. If they instead arrange for the profit to show up on the US side, they only pay US taxes. So yeah they want to move profits to
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Why should any sovereign country base its laws (tax or otherwise) on what other countries do?
You know, one of the primary functions of a sovereign government is to ensure the best possible life and outcomes for its own citizens first, when dealing with the rest of the world.
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You asked why. Because a) it just plain makes sense and b) other countries find it rather annoying that the US takes the tax on UK and EU sales. Getting along well with others matters.
That's actually something the US hasn't recognized the value of recently, getting along with our allies. Trump is "America First" the Obama administration very much focused on trying to make nice with (appease?) countries in the middle east that see us as their enemy. Along the way, he alienated our traditional allies.
It's
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No, the US company makes the profits on the markup of the devices sold. The retail stores in the UK then pay significant sales tax on that, 20%!! It also pays it's fair share without exploitation of the profits that its local retail stores make.
Consider it this way. If Apple had no Apple stores, and was a US-only company, but it exported it's products to third party UK retailers. Then what? If the third party retailer had 1.4B in sales, 1.35B in expenses, and paid 7.7M in taxes (not counting VAT), then
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> If the third party retailer had 1.4B in sales, 1.35B in expenses
That's the rub. Most of that expense is Apple UK buying devices from Apple US. Apple can set that price however they want. They can choose arbitrarily whether they're the UK stores to have 1.4 billion in expenses or 0.7 billion.
Because the US tax law is different from other countries, they are going to have to pay taxes in the US for UK dales anyway. So they set the price they charge themselves such that they don't make any money in th
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No. The retail operations in the UK are taxes solely upon the UK retail operations! They cannot collect more taxes based upon profits made in the US, because those profits are already taxed in the US. The Apple retail stores are treated legally as independent operations, this allows both Apple and third party retailers to compete fairly against each other. If Apple moved all its operations to the UK, it would likely still be done this way, with the Apple manufacturing and headquarters taxes independentl
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> Apple is not setting the price in the UK to lower their own taxes there. That would be illegal as it would be an unfair to the competing retailers. If they were to be fair, the rules would have to be uniform and apply to everyone equally.
Oh they pay EXACTLY the price as every other retailer who is in the 3-4 million units bracket and who has a exclusive contract to sell nothing but Apple devices. No other retailer in the 3-4 million unit bracket in the UK pays a different price. Of course, there are
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So no iphone sellers other than Apple Store? If Apple undercuts the competition by cutting prices, then that is a not good. However that is a separate legal issue unrelated to taxation, it is a legal issue involved unfair trade practices.
Sure, Al Capone was convicted of tax evasion when he couldn't be put away for other crimes. However in that example, Al Capone actually WAS guilty of tax evasion. Apple here is doing everything legal here, and above board, and without obscure loopholes. In the UK, compan
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Well, this US tax thing has been in place LONG before Trump or Obama, or Bush...or....
And while I agree Trump could have done things a LOT more diplomatically, I do agree with him standing u
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> do agree with him standing up to so many other nations
I don't disagree with that.
> free military coverage by us, and US funds from bases there
Consider that maybe them letting us have bases in their territory might not be ENTIRELY us doing them a favor. It just might be that there are advantages to being to very big fish, to having not only the most powerful military, but also the ability to project force anywhere in the world at our leisure.
It might be that it's handy for the US that when it push c
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> They paid their their fair share of tax on their net income for their UK stores
In this case, the net profit of their UK stores is a completely made up number, chosen by Apple. It need not bear any resemblance to reality. See my other post for why.
Apple may very well (and perfectly legally) have another set of books which tracks the *actual* profit of the stores. The profit they choose to recognize in the UK is a complete fiction, based on how much they decide to charge themselves for buying the pro
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Is the net profit made for selling those items similar to what would be done by a third party vendor? If yes, then it's fair. The Apple retail stores should not be required to pay tax on the entire markup value of the products, because that is already taxed elsewhere. The Apple retail stores should be taxed solely based upon their retail operations only, otherwise it is unfair (tax more than competing retailers then it is unfair to Apple, tax less than competing retailers and it is unfair to those retail
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> Is the net profit made for selling those items similar to what would be done by a third party vendor? If yes, then it's fair.
The reported profit is 2.7% of revenue. So, no.
For comparison, Best Buy reported $9.9B profit on $42.88B revenue. So about 24%.
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£1.4B - £1.30 = £50 in net revenue. So at 3.6% profit, it's less than Best Buy. Is Best Buy paying London rents? Maybe, dunno. In any case, Apple claims £1.35B in expenses. Now it's up to the UK tax office to determine if that's legitimate or not. We do not have the evidence, we don't have the details of what Apple claimed. All we have is a clickbait story that has struck a spark in people so that they believe something wrong is happening here.
On the other hand, dont compare B
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I see that you really, really wish that the folks running Apple were extremely stupid ans paid more taxes than they needed to. I see that you're going to insist that's the case no matter what. Have fun with that. See you in the next story.
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No, I was arguing that what they paid was correct, and there's no indication so far that they underpaid.
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If they double-paid, paying in both countries with they only have to pay in the US, then their accountants are incompetent and should be fired.
You want so badly for them to have incompetent accountants that you're now trying to argue that 2.7% is a reasonable profit for a high-end store. Either that, or you recognize that's a horrible margin and any store with such a margin should be closed, but for some crazy reason you want Apple's management to be just aa incompetent as you wish their accountants were.
What I legally owe is much higher than Apple (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: What I legally owe is much higher than Apple (Score:2)
Maybe you can set up a corporation in a low tax state that owns the right to your legal name and you can pay that corporation for the rights to use it?
You can't (Score:2)
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No, HMRC would (almost certainly already have) declare that an unlawful tax avoidance scheme, and thus ineligible for the purposes of avoiding tax.
You can set up a company to market the rights to use your name but unless you're an internationally renowned sports superstar it's probably not worth the effort.
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No, HMRC would (almost certainly already have) declare that an unlawful tax avoidance scheme, and thus ineligible for the purposes of avoiding tax.
Why not? It's what corporations like Apple do, and corporations are people too, friend.
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Not in the UK.
Not even in the US to be fair. Particularly not when it comes to taxation.
Re: So? (Score:2)
'...change the law's
Sure, just give me a minute...
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Hell, how many of you out there that will be bitching about this, voluntarily pay more than they legally owe, and refuse to take legal deductions?
I've done this.
Admittedly because the paperwork made the effort required far too much for the sums involved, but hey, it counts.
If it saved me the 64 million that Apple are managing to not pay in the UK then yes, I'd find a way to get through the paperwork.
But that's not the story. The story is that Apple are perceived as failing to pay a fair level of taxation, which also gives them a competitive advantage over smaller companies lacking the complex international structures and scale to make that approach w
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The tax in question is Corporation Tax. VAT is a sales tax and is paid direct to HMRC.
Corporation Tax is a tax on Profits.
the £1.4B in Expenses is what people can't stomach. Starbucks, Google, Microsoft and a host of others work like this. Pay some offshore entity a stonking great license fee to use the company (of which that are a part) name.
This is why many countries are implimenting a Digital Tax that will make sure that these hefty [cough][cough] expenses don't rob the country where the sales are
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Not all of it, no.
But VAT is contentious too, given it disproportionately impacts the low paid.
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I believe that his point is that the answer to that depends whether you're an individual or a corporation.