Twitter to locate international operations in Ireland

j_col · on Sept 26, 2011

There are other countries in the World that have lower effective corporation taxes than Ireland, but what they don’t have is:

1. A well educated and productive workforce with English as their primary language.

2. Full membership of the EU and the Eurozone, giving us access to a massive market.

3. A stable government that is pro-business.

4. Close historical and cultural ties with the US.

5. A vibrant local tech scene.

6. And, yeah, very nice tax rates and grant aid incentives for setting up here in the first place, but surely other countries can compete on this?

jarin · on Sept 26, 2011

I would guess it has to do with the "Double Irish" tax shelter:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-10-21/google-2-4-rate-sho...

Loic · on Sept 26, 2011

And this is why the EU Amazon datacenter is there too. Irish is good for royalty based stuff (software etc.) and they invoice everything hardware (the retailer side of Amazon) from Luxembourg where you can negotiate your taxes with the authorities.

Oh, the result, is that Ireland is definitely not the best place to serve Europe from a latency point of view... so we have bad latency from EC2 EU because of fiscal optimizations...

wgx · on Sept 26, 2011

Or the "Dutch Sandwich" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_Arrangement#Dutch_...

sschueller · on Sept 26, 2011

I find it sad that all these companies put their legal headquarters overseas in order to avoid paying US taxes.

US citizens are required to pay US taxes when living and working overseas so why don't US corporations?

rmc · on Sept 26, 2011

The Irish Government likes to promote the "Knowledge Economy" and wants to build a high-tech economy.

And recently a death was ruled as having been caused by "spontaneous human combustion" ( http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-15032614 ). sigh