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Comment by Mirioron | Hacker News Reader

It's fine from your perspective, but put yourself in the shoes of politicians. It's their job to advocate for the best outcome for their constituents, which means that they would like all of the jobs to come to their constituents.

>It's Apple claiming they should only pay Irish taxes on the profits of selling an iPhone developed in California, manufactured in China and sold in Italy because they have opened an office full of accountants in Ireland.

They're already paying various amounts of taxes in all of those regions. VAT is paid where the person buys the product, for example. Income taxes are paid where the workers are.

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It is all well and good for Ireland, or whoever, to try to attract companies to move jobs there. But that is not what is happening. One Infinite Loop isn't in Dublin. What Ireland is doing is allowing companies that have a purely administrative presence in Ireland to claim tax residency in spite of having far more operations and employees in London, Paris, NYC, San Francisco, Hong Kong and numerous other high-tax places.

This allows tech companies to have their cake and eat it too by enjoying low tax rates on their entire European income without actually moving their operations to that country. If Google had 50,000 software engineers in Dublin, that would be one thing. But no one can seriously claim that any significant part of the work that produces Google Search goes on in Ireland, yet that is exactly what happens on their financial statements while they open a billion-dollar new engineering office in London.

Companies are free to move wherever they wish. They should not be free to claim they are domiciled somewhere that they plainly are not.

> no one can seriously claim that any significant part of the work that produces Google Search goes on in Ireland

Hmm. Most of their European SREs who keep the service up and running are in Dublin, alongside most of their European customer support, European accountants, European legal team.

Arguably, they contribute quite a lot to the success of the service.

If they weren't there, would the service have made as much inroad compared to if they weren't.

So, arguably, their presence is _very_ material.

Also, you're missing the point of the single EU market.

Ultimately, it's a game of assignment and they chose to assign their sales(& IP?) to the country that was most attractive to them.

Apple includes the VAT in the selling price of its products. Therefore it isn't correct to view it as Apple paying the VAT. The purchaser pays the VAT. Apple just collects it and passes that payment along to the taxing authority. Apple also doesn't pay the income tax of its employees. What Apple pays its employees are expenses and and therefore are deducted from its income. Apple pays tax on profits and not on its business expenses.

it's somewhat pointless to look at who pays taxes at the surface level. depending on market power, the actual burden of the tax can shift dramatically between buyer and seller. it has almost nothing to do with who officially pays the tax. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_incidence

I’m not an economist. It seems to me that while the VAT on Apple’s products affect the supply/demand for those products it is best to view the VAT as something paid by the consumer. Do you know if this is wrong? This is my intuition but since I’m not an economist my intuition doens’t count for much.

Income taxes aren’t paid by apple. Those are paid by the employees.

So change them so that they're paid by the employer instead, if you think that would make a big difference.

This glib response is quite naive and ignores second order implications.

How would we tax a corporation as the number of employees trends to 0?

If they hold property in your jurisdiction then you have property tax. If they sell to your people then you have VAT.

And if they have no activities in your country at all, what gives you a right to tax them?

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