(N.B. I'm ironically copying the language used to describe people who are might or might not be working but still depend on government programs for food, housing, etc)
I have two friends from Ireland who work at a tech company who recently opened an office there. They love the work and say that it is easy for them and their friends to get jobs because of all the companies coming there. My company is thinking about opening a European office, and Ireland is under consideration. This move might slow or stop companies from coming to Ireland.
What's wrong with that?
Companies don't exist in a vacuum, as evident in that very few companies prefer to put their offices in the middle of the sea or deep the jungle. They benefit greatly from infrastructure of our society, and it's fair that they should pay their share to build and maintain it.
There are a lot of people who think that much (if not most) tax dollars go to waste, so they do not want to pay because they think that taxes are funding harms to their fellow citizens and foreigners. I am one of those people, and I do not want to be responsible for hurting my fellow man.
I wonder if you would be so principled if it cost you money rather than saved you money.
I use the roads which I (and all my fellow citizens) are forced to pay for, at least partly because the government has crowded out all the alternatives. With respect to firefighters, I would be very happy to return to the system where the insurance company provided fire-fighting services, as was the case before the government took over the industry.
I have often made the case against policies that greatly benefit me (financially and otherwise), but at an unacceptable cost to others, and I am sure that I am not alone in having done so.
Companies playing legal games around taxes is exactly the behavior that the complicated tax code incentivizes. Play games, get money. Are corporations not supposed to play? It's parallel to programming productivity measurements. If a company starts counting LOC and rewarding it, they are going to get precisely what they asked for: More lines of code.
Wrong is a subjective value, but yes, most people feel that it's wrong.
Immensely wealthy multinational corporations have a lot of money to spend on lawyers and accountants, so while these companies are probably not evading tax the avoidance schemes they come up with are sometimes not legal requiring them to repay.
Don't forget that tax is part of law and so there is what's written and how that's interpreted by the courts. Until you've had case law there are areas of uncertainty.
It's not a hard number but perceptions of fairness are certainly important in how democratic countries formulate tax law.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taking_the_piss (first sentence: unreasonable).
Perhaps you'd prefer to use the term 'electorate'.
Regardless, the meaning was clear and your objection rather ridiculous.
At a global scale, there is only law. If countries want more taxes, they have to change their laws, and be prepared to deal with the unintended consequences of those changes.
Most businesses prioritize their own market value, and subordinate all other motives, including apparent political posture, towards maximizing that one metric. Therefore, they only pay taxes to avoid the negative effects of not paying taxes, rather than out of any perceived moral obligations.
The companies are there because the optimization process that involves jurisdiction shopping determined that establishing a business presence in Ireland provided greater benefits than the other options. There can be only one "best" jurisdiction for any given business entity. Complaining that someone else's seems to be better for more entities than yours is just sour grapes.
If you can't compete on a tax cost basis, there are other ways to attract business: a zero-corruption bureaucracy, privacy or secrecy for principals, reduced reporting requirements, reduced time from initial filing to practice, ironclad and proactive intellectual property protections, strong infrastructure, rock-solid stable units of accounting, or any of dozens of other points that may provide business value that more than compensates for the tax burden.
So fairness is a red herring. It is the objective value that is provided in proportion to the taxes taken that determines whether taxes are "too high" for a business to bear.
That also levels the field a bit in that companies large enough to run departments that optimize for such loop holes have less of an advantage over the small fellows in the garage.
Market at work, and all that.