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Comment by eesmith | Hacker News Reader

I think you should be cautious about saying "Ireland cheated the system". The onus is placed more directly on the Irish tax authority, and then more broadly the government, and then more broadly the voting population, and only then the entire population.

Consider how the ruling says "Ireland had renounced tax revenue, which had given rise to a loss of State resources". This means many people living in Ireland got less government resources than they would have, including people like children and immigrants who did not have the right to vote so cannot be said to have been involved in the cheating, even though they are part of Ireland.

Legally speaking it's not a "payout" but "recovery of unlawful state aid."

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> This means many people living in Ireland got less government resources than they would have

No it doesn't. Ireland did this deal to benefit from it. What they lost from direct tax in one area they gained in others. Had Ireland not made this deal, it's unlikely it would have become the conduit for Apple profits from around the world.

The subject of the ruling contains "concerning tax rulings issued by Ireland in favour of Apple"

Just because a country has children and immigrants does not absolve it of criticism.

Can you explain where exactly did Ireland gain benefit from not collecting these taxes?

The jobs provided via Apple, FDI in Ireland, Tax paid by apple staff in Ireland... general spend?

There is just a tiny count employees in Ireland, mostly legal to run the sandwitch.

> There is just a tiny count employees in Ireland, mostly legal to run the sandwitch.

Utter nonsense.

Apple Ireland has more employees than Germany, France, Belgium, Denmark, Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden combined.

There are employment quotas for the tax arrangements.

> https://www.apple.com/ie/job-creation/

That is completely untrue. There are over six thousand people employed in their Irish HQ.

That is a tiny amount in comparison to their 170.000 person workforce, isn't it?

Because getting even <1% of Apple's, Google's, $FANGs EU wide tax revenue is a lot better than getting 0% of that revenue if they were to set their HQs in another EU country that would give them and even sweeter tax deal.

And that's the problem right there. It's a constant race to the bottom between EU states where the EU taxpayers are the loosers and the corpos are the winners.

Would it be really 0%? Is there any grounds for that? Those companies are based in Ireland due to IP law, not tax law.

Can't companies abuse the IP law to wash other profits as IP costs?

Yep, this is why they were based in Ireland - due to their IP law. Which isn't quite the same as 0% taxes.

The Irish patent box was at 0% tax till 2015.

While <1% is correct it's over two magnitudes too large. Saying <0.01% would be more informative.

"The EU head office said that Ireland granted such lavish tax breaks to Apple that the company's effective corporate tax rate on its European profits dropped from 1 percent in 2003 to a mere 0.005 percent in 2014." https://apnews.com/article/apple-european-union-tech-b1575db...

You can google why do countries give tax breaks.

Are you suggesting that Ireland did not benefit from this illegal deal?

Yes, I'm suggesting that Ireland as a country did not benefit from this deal. That does not mean that some Irish individuals did not.

Apple Ireland has over 60 open positions for roles like Machine Leaning or Data Analytics while similar sized countries like Finland, Lithuania, Croatia, Denmark, Slovakia, Austria, Hungary have 0.

Apple Ireland is home to Apples only self-operated manufacturing plant in the world employing ~6,000 people building iMacs to order by hand (lol). There are employment quotas to meet for the tax arrangements which is one example of how Ireland as a whole benefits.

So how many decades will they have to pay taxes to recoup 13B$? :)

No idea, that doesn't matter though because if Ireland didn't give these massive unlawful tax deals then it wouldn't be a major tech hub for large tech companies like Apple, Google, Facebook, etc.. and that 13b$ tax bill wouldn't exist in the first place.

Ireland is ranked 2nd with the highest GDP per capita in the world and they got there by being an unlawful tax haven benefiting as whole at the expense of others.

> You can google

Can we write “search”? Google is hardly a usefull search engine anymore.

> What they lost from direct tax in one area they gained in others.

Where is your evidence? I quoted the court decision to support my position.

The very existence of revolving door politics is an example of how conflicts of interest can exist which favor those in power, to the overall detriment of the population.

Government officials and politicians are well aware there may be a cushy job for them with the big companies they once regulated, so long as those companies are happy with them.

Thus I again caution on using "Ireland" in a way which blurs the difference between those in Ireland who gained from unlawful state aid and those who gain from its return.

so they lost on the unit and will make it back in volume?

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