It is much more likely to be Brexit related. They are the ONLY highly educated and native english speaking country in the EU and are eating the UKs business
The land of scholars and saints.
I dont even think they have the lowest rate in the EU and they are free to set it however they wish.
There’s literally a popular tax avoidance scheme called the “Double Irish” - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement
The Irish sandwich loopholes are regarded as the largest tax avoidance scheme in history. It was actively facilitated by the Irish government the whole time.
> Irish state documents released to the Irish national archives in December 2018 showed that Fine Gael ministers in 1984 sought legal advice on how U.S. corporations could avoid taxes by operating from Ireland.
> the Irish government, on lobbying from PwC Ireland's IFSC tax partner, Feargal O'Rourke, relaxed the rules for sending royalty payments to non–EU countries without incurring Irish withholding tax.
> The Irish Revenue issued private rulings to Apple in 1991 and 2007 regarding this hybrid-double Irish structure, which the EU Commission considered as illegal State aid.
Like, just look at the corporation tax income for Ireland for the past six or seven years, the money is definitely getting taxed in Ireland.
Note that you'll need to accept common debt and burden sharing if you want any hope of it passing.
If you don't want those things, then you're accepting tax competition as part of the price you pay for avoiding things you don't want.
Like, Ireland has incredibly high debt that we weren't allowed to default on by the EU/IMF/ECB so if you fix that, then I suspect the Irish people would be super happy to stop this unfair tax competition that you're talking about.
Becoming a tax haven is not a great longterm strategy and is not in the populace’s best interests. The gov is supporting business not people.
Can you explain to me why it's tax evasion rather than tax competition?
Like, taxation is not an EU competency so it's up to member states.
As for why it happened, basically Ireland has no natural resources, no historical wealth and was a basket case for hundreds of years. The government/civil servants decided that the best thing to do was to try and entice large multinationals to set up here, based first on it being an English speaking country, and it's really low wages.
The wages increased, and the pitch became that we were part of the EU, and didn't tax global revenue (just the Irish revenue), and didn't apply VAT on exports (particularly of interest to pharma).
And quite frankly, speaking as an Irish person, this was definitely in my best interests, as my generation of Irish people was the first to not have to emigrate for work.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not a big fan of transfer pricing schemes in general, but those are the rules and Ireland played them relatively well.
> The gov is supporting business not people.
Historically true, the multinationals I worked for tended to pay very little tax, and I paid loads but not any more, since about 2016.