On December 31, 2015, the Irish Times reported on an agreement Apple has made with Italy to settle an Italian tax claim. The article, “Apple’s €318m tax deal may affect other multinationals in EU,” [http://www.irishtimes.com/business/technology/apple-s-318m-tax-deal-may-affect-other-multinationals-in-eu-1.2480665] reports that Apple’s settlement with Italy resulted from investigators not charging Apple “with fiscal fraud but rather with an incomplete [tax] declaration.” Google is reportedly due to pay a similar amount to Italian authorities for its payment of lower taxes in Ireland rather than to Italy. The European Union in Brussels has been active trying to harmonize European tax laws by exposing excessive funneling of profits to tax havens like Ireland.
Apple has also been criticized in the United States by the Senate Permanent Investigative Subcommittee for taking advantage of “loopholes over a four-year period from 2009 to 2012, to defer paying U.S. taxes on more than $10 billion of offshore income per year. As a result, Apple has continued to build up its offshore cash holdings which now exceed $102 billion.”
Congress should act promptly to harmonize international tax rules that would result in benefits to U.S. taxpayers.
For more on this story, see the July 2013 column, “Maximizing Returns or Unethical Tax Avoidance?” at http://www.imanet.org/PDFs/Public/SF/2013_07/07_2013_ethics.pdf
February 2016
