
Apple will start paying $21B in back taxes to Ireland - jklp
https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-paying-ireland-16-billion-dollars-back-taxes-2018-4
======
naskwo
It's weird that the EU has a monetary union, but so much difference in
corporate income tax rates.

Great that IE is 12%, but this "competition" is BS in the sense that they
needed the higher-tax countries to bail them out just a few years ago:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-2008_Irish_banking_crisis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-2008_Irish_banking_crisis)

It's a leak in the EU system, and it needs to be plugged.

Just imagine what a unified income tax rate in the EU would do. (Post-Brexit,
although if I were a gambling man, I'd wager that the Brexit will never
materialize; A Brexit would sort of be like throwing out your existing post-
ww2 source code instead of refactoring. Recipe for disaster).

THEN countries would really need to compete on quality of life and
infrastructure to attract (US) corporations to establish show. Amsterdam is
happy to welcome all the post-Brexit (see comment above) banks and EU-related
orgs, as is Frankfurt.

~~~
SeanMacConMara
>they needed the higher-tax countries to bail them out just a few years ago:

You have that the wrong way around.

The Irish taxpayers, unwillingly, covered the massive gambling losses of
private individuals and companies(including a group of businesses called
"banks") who were playing in the (German-lead US-style) light-touch bank de-
regulation "bank-casinos" of Europe. The "casinos" in Ireland had a
disproportionate share of that action at approx 40% of the EU total.

The total cost to the Irish tax-payer was approx 65 billion euro I've heard.

We bailed them out using money we _borrowed_ from them and have paid back in
full (recently i think?) with interest.

Thats like borrowing money from your loan shark to cover his poker losses.

~~~
IAmEveryone
I usually don't engage in this sort of trivial nationalism. But I just have to
inject that your retelling of this story omits the fact that Irish banks were
obviously first in line to go belly-up.

It is true that those banks had various lenders in Germany/France/wherever,
and that the consequences of an all-out collapse of the Irish economy would
have had negative effects in those countries as well.

But presenting it as some sort of altruistic sacrifice to allow them to rescue
Ireland from a potato-based future is just adding moral bankruptcy to the
other.

~~~
SeanMacConMara
a few points

Thanks

Nothing about this is trivial.

This is not nationalism. There should be no pride in our creation or solution
to our portion of this moronic mess.

The obvious was ommitted because it was obvious. The banks are only "Irish" in
a nominal sense. The people or state as a whole didn't own them. Don't forget
they are international commerical businesses and can and should be shut down
when they fail like any other business.

Obviously they are a critical piece of modern infrastructure and there was
already plans in place for their failure such as "deposit protection
insurance" schemes etc. The big question is if those plans were/are robust
enough in modern countries. We _all_ need to be able to confidentaly able to
"cull" bad components of our modern infrastructure without fear of causing
wider problems.

Nothing about it was altruistic. Fear and panic very obviously gripped the
politicians involved on all sides.

As an interesting related historic aside, we survived reasonably well without
our banks for 6 months previously when we were a much weaker economy.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_bank_strikes_%281966%E2%...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_bank_strikes_%281966%E2%80%9376%29)

------
chx
> Apple was hit by the European Commission with a $21 billion bill for back
> taxes in 2016.

> It’s starting to pay the funds

You know, I was fined for not paying my installments (not my taxes! just my
installments) in 2017 and these guys didn't pay their back taxes for _two
bloody years_ and were not charged hefty penalties and interest for it.
Really, blood boiling unfair.

~~~
grecy
Absolutely, I agree 100%

One year I made a mistake on my taxes and my refund was $1000 more than it
should have been. Six months later not only was I fined for the mistake and
forced to pay back the $1000, I had to pay interest on that $1000. (Canada)

This year when the government owed me $6000 in overpaid taxes, why didn't they
pay me interest on _my_ money they were holding...?

~~~
justherefortart
Because your taxes are your duty.

In the US, if you don't file for a year and are owed, after the filing period
they do pay interest. But not for the initial filing year. In fact, if you
over pay too much, they (the IRS) can penalize you for that as well.

~~~
gamblor956
Their is no penalty for overpaying your taxes unless you mean the implicit
loss of the time value of the money overpaid.

Anyone who's been "penalized" for overpaying their taxes was actually
underpaying their taxes prior to their overpayment. People don't realize that
taxes are generally due over the course of the year (usually quarterly), not
all at once on April 15/16/17\. The April deadline is just the due date for
the _final_ payment of your prior year's tax liability. If you were
underpaying during the year, you could be penalized for that even if you
overpaid in April the following year.

This is why trying to game your withholding on your wages (i.e., minimal or
underwithholding) is such a bad idea. Any gain (i.e., investing in stocks) is
usually more than offset by the penalties and interest you pay if you end up
being wrong about how much in taxes you owed. The stock market would have to
have a very bullish year to see an upside, usually better than 10% growth--and
the target just goes up as interest rates go up.

~~~
justherefortart
It must have been some quarterly business stuff that stuck in my head.

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Kudos
That's Australian dollars, it's €13B.

~~~
k_
So that's why there is such a difference with the link about the escrow
account [1]. Maybe the title should be edited on HN to reflect that, since the
australian context is not obvious (not hidden, either, but I missed it at
first)

[1] [http://www.businessinsider.com/r-ireland-expects-apple-
back-...](http://www.businessinsider.com/r-ireland-expects-apple-back-tax-in-
escrow-account-in-first-quarter-2018-minister-2017-12?IR=T)

------
corey_moncure
That's roughly $5000 per Irish citizen. A good day for those chaps! Presumably
they will be paying interest on all this borrowed money, yes? As well as late
fees for non-payment?

~~~
stolson
If only.

------
Isamu
NOTE: Headline is misleading.

Actually what they are starting to do is put the money into escrow while the
case moves slowly through the courts. Ireland is not yet receiving money for
back taxes.

Ireland's position is still that the taxes are not owed and that the
government made no improper deals.

It will take some years before the taxes are actually paid to Ireland or Apple
gets the money back from escrow.

------
Tepix
Finally! It's a shame that Ireland had to be forced to demand this money from
Apple.

~~~
Dawny33
Ireland wasn't demanding the money. They were actually opposing this ruling

~~~
kabes
That's what Tepix is saying. Ireland had to be forced (by the EU) to demand
it.

------
FBISurveillance
I'm glad this is happening, hope they'll close this Double Irish Dutch
Sandwich loophole for good.

~~~
briandear
I don’t. Not unless European countries plan to lower taxes. High tax rates are
what causes these accountancy gymnastics. If the EU just charged a flat 10%
tax — and actually enforced it, tax revenues would rise and these loopholes
would be unneeded. Foreign companies would actually relocate to Europe by
choice and not by necessity. Unemployment would also drop as a result.
Business would boom.

~~~
stephen_g
According to certain theoretical frameworks... Empirically though there
generally isn't any causal relationship demonstrated between corporate tax
rates and wages, economic growth, or unemployment in most statistical data.

This is a really big debate in Australia at the moment, a lobby group made up
of large corporates (the Business Council of Australia) is campaigning heavily
for a tax cut given the recent Trump cuts. So there's been a lot of
examination of this data and the best they have is intuitive arguments ("of
course if there's more profits you'll have more investment and employment")
but they admitted in a Senate enquiry just yesterday that they didn't actually
have any demonstrable statistical evidence that tax cuts have caused
employment growth, wage growth or increased investment in any developed
economy.

------
macco
When will countries finally understand that it's better to co-operate them too
compete against another? Multinational companies are playing them against each
other.

~~~
Narkov
You are right but it will never happen. It only takes one country to break
ranks and the game is back on again.

~~~
IAmEveryone
Seems like this very article is about this practice ending?

------
hungerstrike
Duplicate of
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16913050](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16913050)

------
acchow
AAPL up 1.1%.

Seems the markets already believed Apple would lose this one.

------
sabujp
how about you pay back taxes to the US

------
PunchTornado
Sadly, the government has to accept it.

Damn EU! Destroying our country.

~~~
NicoJuicy
The EU bailed Ireland out a couple of years ago. Perhaps you should realize
that the "tax break" and their "double sandwich" wouldn't be possible WITHOUT
the EU.

~~~
ocfnash
Like most Irish people, I am a huge fan of the EU, and of the many benefits we
enjoy thanks to our fellow European citizens, via the EU.

Nevertheless I feel compelled to nitpick at the statement that the EU bailed
Ireland out.

I believe the most important components of the so-called bailout instrumented
by the IMF, ECB, and EU were that:

    
    
      A. Ireland was forced to turn about 65bn euro of private (banking) debt into public debt [for scale: our national debt was 36bn a couple of years before]
    
      B. The Irish government was allowed to run an _enormous_ budget deficit for many years
    

I don't know what would have been best for Ireland given the situation, but
I'm not delighted about A and B. Even if the terms of the bailout were best
for Ireland, all of money received went onto our national debt, which is now
well over 200bn euro, and which we must pay back with interest.

