[skore]

Now now, be fair. There IS a difference between "paying only the taxes that I am required to pay" and setting up a Double Irish with a Dutch Sandwich.

One is investing resources to minimize failure ("I want to make sure we don't pay more than we need to pay"), which I completely agree with - if your accountant fails to do that, it's not a good accountant. But the other is a proactive investment of even more money to pay even less taxes ("I want to pay even less than what would be normal by the intent of the tax law").

[AnthonyMouse]

I'm not sure what line you're attempting to draw. An accountant's job isn't just to make sure you file the right paperwork, it's to identify courses of action that could have a significant effect on the bottom line. You seem to be suggesting that a business would be doing something unreasonable by moving any of its operations into a jurisdiction with lower taxes, since that would be making an investment in order to pay less taxes.

[skore]

> You seem to be suggesting that a business would be doing something unreasonable by moving any of its operations into a jurisdiction with lower taxes [...]

Moving to or setting up a subsidiary in a different jurisdiction: Completely fine.

Doing the same thing for the sole purpose of avoiding taxes: Not fine.

I really don't get what's so hard to understand about that. How many employees do Google or Apple have in Ireland, the Cayman Islands or the Netherlands? And how many in the US? Quite simple, I think.

[AnthonyMouse]

>Moving to or setting up a subsidiary in a different jurisdiction: Completely fine.

>Doing the same thing for the sole purpose of avoiding taxes: Not fine.

And how exactly do you propose to distinguish the two?

"Number of employees" is a completely worthless metric. Apple (and/or Foxconn) employs many times more employees in China than in the U.S., does that mean they should be reporting most of their profits in China?

[skore]

I'm pretty sure that Foxconn and Apple are separate corporations, so I have no idea what you're getting at.

Apple has 73k employees, 50k of which are in the US. Pretty sure most of them have benefited from US society (education, roads, police stations etc.) or benefit from it now that they have moved to the US.

[AnthonyMouse]

>I'm pretty sure that Foxconn and Apple are separate corporations, so I have no idea what you're getting at.

Apple US is a separate corporation from Apple China too, that's how all of this works. Apple Ireland ends up with all the profits and is a distinct corporate entity from Apple US.

You keep talking about use of government services or where employees are. Those things are not corporate profit. If you want to tax companies that employ your workforce then you can tax payroll. If you want to tax companies that use local government services then you can tax commercial real estate. What you can't do is try to tax corporate profit at one of the highest nominal rates in the world and then be surprised when international corporations arrange to stop reporting any profits within your jurisdiction. Profit is a highly mobile asset. It's like trying to levy a local property tax on gold bullion -- the people who own large amounts of bullion are just going to move it out of your tax jurisdiction. If you then say "but they still live here and use government services" they're just going to shrug and look at you like you're a crazy person for expecting anything different to have happened, because you're trying to tax the wrong thing.

[skore]

Sheesh.

Foxconn wasn't build as a subsidiary of Apple. Not sure what you're getting at with that. Yes, I understand the technicalities, but if it didn't happen that way and the intent of how it happens is the way it is, arguing the permutations is a strawman.

> You keep talking about use of government services or where employees are. Those things are not corporate profit.

Yes and no. Those government services are not corporate profit, sure. But they are what makes the Apple corporation possible in the first place. Apple wasn't founded in Ireland, the Netherlands and certainly not on the Cayman Islands. The "thank you" payment for that is called taxes.

> they're just going to shrug and look at you like you're a crazy person for expecting anything different to have happened

Yup, that's what I would call destructive attitude. A society works because a sufficient number of people think it's a good idea to make it work. Large corporations are simply lucky to get away with behaving differently, for profit. If a majority of people were behaving like that - cutting around the system at every chance they get while obscuring their tracks with money, for their own benefit - you end up with no society at all very quickly.

Put differently: large corporations should count themselves lucky that there are enough reasonable people (the lower and middle class suckers who are constantly being degraded to a purer form of worker drone consumers) to offset the damage that they do.

All laws have to assume to a varying extent that people are interested in the society they live in. Because if they aren't, no law whatsoever is going to make them a good member of society. Kind of like how the DSM-IV has no definition of psychopathy because it describes the absence of a mind capable of having a disorder in the first place. The way those large corporations behave is truly antisocial behavior, lacking regard for the deeper and finer points of how society works.

> because you're trying to tax the wrong thing

Funny, because to me it seems that no matter what you tax, people who don't want to pay taxes will either seek and find or invest and create a way around that.

This isn't a law problem, it's a culture problem. But I suppose you're right, no sense in arguing culture and civil responsibility with people who lack both.

[pvnick]

You're overcomplicating the issue. It's not the accountant's job to make up for lazy lawmaking. It's the lawmakers. Go bug the lawmakers, not the people trying to make money within the law.

Would you seriously have done differently in Google's shoes if it meant the difference between millions of dollars? Billions of dollars? Your answer to that question is probably why you're not making those kinds of decisions.

[skore]

Well, I suppose I can only quote Larry Page on this:

--- --- --- ---

He also noted that he has also been sad with how the industry has been unable to advance the Web as quickly as it could have because of a focus on negativity and zero sum gains. He also noted other companies like Oracle and his difficulty in working with them, “Money is more important to them than collaboration.”

--- --- --- ---

As for your feeble attempt at diverting on the law issue: Look, Apple has more cash reserves than the US government. To act as though all that is needed is lawmakers "finally doing their job right" is ludicrous. The reason why I cannot go bug the lawmakers is because they have dozens of lobbyist per capita throwing money into their faces all day long.

At the end of the day, I believe in human progress. Human progress happens when we are fair and kind to one another. Apple doesn't need all of that money, just as Google doesn't need all of theirs. Asking them to give a tiny bit more back to the society that they are a powerful member of so that everybody is better of is far from being as silly as you try to paint it.

[pvnick]

"My good friend and CFO, Larry, why didn't you set up that offshore account that would legally save us millions of dollars in taxes per quarter like we talked about? That way we could hire more workers so they could feed their families and receive adequate health coverage."

"Oh that wouldn't be fair to the people that couldn't do that."

"You're fired."

[skore]

Alright, you really are just trolling, got it.

So unless you are setting up multiple subsidiaries in tax havens and funnel the money around in a way that lets you narrowly avoid the laws that otherwise quite clearly determine what your fair share to society is, there is no way to have a proper business and in the end, the children get hurt and poor little Rebecca can't afford to pay for lunch at school and everybody points fingers at her. Boo, boo, haa, haa, money, money. Understood.

This kind of strawman argument really used to make me sick, but these days, I'm mostly bummed out about how I've become so used to seeing it.

[pvnick]

Here's my logic:

1. Your "fair share to society" is determined by the law.

2. These companies are following the law to the "t"

3. If you don't like it then change the law.

It's that simple. Case closed.

[skore]

No, the "fair share to society" is determined by the prevailing morals of society. You can make laws all day, if society doesn't agree with them, you run into problems (ask some leaders in the middle east).

Imagine a town at a lake. There is a law that all citizens can only take so much water out of the lake. Now there is a guy taking a lot of water out of the lake - to the point where he steps over the law. But wait! He is actually registered as the citizen of a different town! Phew. Law abiding citizen after all.

What happens is that some corporations extract more value from society than is healthy for that society. That they have so much money that they can bend the tax code to their will without breaking it is completely besides the point. The result is the same: They have a net negative effect on society. That's not fair.

The lake of the town is being sucked dry. Just look at how much money those Double Irish corporations have in their accounts while a lot of of countries struggle to pay their public employees and have to make drastic cuts that directly affect pretty much only the middle and lower classes. That's not fair at all.

Well, at least they can keep buying those iPads on credit that will ruin the rest of their lives.