[john_flintstone]

It's not tax avoidance either. It would only be tax avoidance if they moved from one EU country to another one that had a lower corporate tax rate. This is their first European office - it makes perfect sense to choose the location that brings the greatest benefits to the company.

[chalst]

Quite so. Richard Murphy put together a set of definitions that might be of interest: http://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2010/07/07/tax-avoidance-...

> Tax avoidance is seeking to minimise a tax bill without deliberate deception (which would be tax evasion) but contrary to the spirit of the law. It therefore involves the exploitation of loopholes and gaps in tax and other legislation in ways not anticipated by the law. Those loopholes may be in domestic tax law alone, but they may also be between domestic tax law and company law or between domestic tax law and accounting regulations, for example. The process can also seek to exploit gaps that exist between domestic tax law and the law of other countries when undertaking international transactions.

(I'm a former tax accountant, at KPMG - these definitions are uncontroversial AFAIK)

[alexkus]

You don't have to move offices to start doing the road of tax avoidance. It's all about where you channel your money internally if you have two companies operating in different tax regimes.

It'll be interesting to see what they do with the profits from their companies (both the US and Ireland).

If they keep a chunk of income in Ireland and only transfer it to the US during tax amnesties then that's one standard form of avoidance.

If the US Dropbox entity starts paying a large sum of to Dropbox Ireland in order to license some part of the technology then we're in to the cunning world of tax avoidance proper.

[nodata]

It depends how they structure the company: where will the workers be, are they going to cheat on their tax using a dodgy licensing scheme, etc.