"WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A loophole in the new U.S. tax law could allow multinational corporations like Apple Inc to avoid paying billions of dollars in taxes on profits stashed overseas, according to experts." https://www.reuters.com/article/us-...gn=Feed:+reuters/businessNews+(Business+News)
Kind of old news,... There was a whole NYT piece on winners and losers of the new tax plan. I may have posted it
Anything to get a big corporation in the news about skating taxes is a boon for the media...panging on the envy of the population... No one argues against taxes all together just only who is benefitting more , just an argument over who pays , how much ,and who deserves the extorted money...
And let's not forget the most ridiculous part: the same population(general public and employees of the company) that cheers so much for the major corporations to pay an ever increasing tax burden is the one who actually pay these taxes(just as every other corporate tax). Talk about shooting one's own foot...
Before the tax cut, the US Corp. rate was the highest OECD rate in the world. Also, the U.S. tax rate was 16 percentage points higher than the worldwide average of 22.8 percent and a little more than 9 percentage points higher than the worldwide GDP-weighted average of 29.8 percent. Out of 173 nations worldwide, only Chad and the UAE had higher tax rates. Compare the former US tax rate of 39% to Ireland's 12.5%. Hmm, I wonder why US corps. like Burger King, Mylan, Johnson Controls, Liberty Global, etc. all did tax inversions? How much corp. income tax revenue is the US getting from those corps. now? In a competitive globalized economy where I call Microsoft support and get a person in India, lower corporate tax rates are important in keeping the US competitive. https://taxfoundation.org/corporate-income-tax-rates-around-world-2015/
It's a well-known fact that actual effective tax rates are much lower than the headline numbers in some countries. One of these countries is the US of A, where the tax code is convoluted and contains a lot of "useful" loopholes and exploits.
I understand that. But, if the US had such a great tax code for companies, why were so many doing tax inversions to move their tax homes out of the US? After all, they do get deductions.
Far be it from me to suggest the US has a great corp tax code. A corp doing a big inversion would still save themselves some money... For instance, the big Pfizer-Allergan deal was supposed to reduce Pfizer's effective tax rate from 23.4% to arnd 18% (moving from New York to Dublin). So there would have been some savings, but they aren't quite as big as the headline numbers would suggest. They probably would have also saved themselves a bundle by paying fewer tax lawyers and accountants. IMHO, complexity is a much bigger issue with the US tax code than the headline number.