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by aidanf 1831 days ago
> This is about countries, like Ireland or Netherlands, with 0% corporate tax rates.

Ireland's corporate tax rate is 12.5%. It is one of the lowest in Europe but certainly not 0%.

2 comments

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ireland_v_Commission : it doesn't matter what the headline rate is, it matters what the effective rate is.

> "selective treatment allowed Apple to pay an effective corporate tax rate of 1 percent on its European profits in 2003 down to 0.005 percent in 2014."

Tricks include transfer pricing; company A charges company B an arbitrary number to reduce company B's profit to zero (so it pays no tax) but this gets classed as exempt in company A.

That is the rate for Irish corporations, not foreign ones. Ireland, Netherlands, Luxembourg all negotiated bilateral deals with individual corporations so their effective tax rates are, at most, 3%.