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Comment by izacus | Hacker News Reader

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

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...

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?

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.

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