For sure they are throwing lawyers at it. It's 13bn after all. But the underlying reason for the appeal is the same; the law is not yet clear as to what should happen.
How is anyone supposed to arrange their affairs if the law they're going to be subjected to isn't established until after the fact?
Notice that we almost never hear about corporations avoiding payroll taxes or VAT. They avoid this kind of tax in particular because the rules are unusually squishy and incoherent, and every time they find another way to do it, governments respond by making it more complicated or even less coherent instead of addressing the root cause and replacing it with something clearer and simpler.
There are other reasons corporations prefer workers to be contractors, but that isn't it.
Contractors paid themselves a minimum salary to avoid the payroll taxes. They then took the rest of their earnings as dividends from their personal services company instead, the combination of payroll taxes + income taxes being higher than taxes on dividends.
Since that ruse has been heavily restricted, employers have had to increase contractor pay to make-up for contractors having to pay more income tax + national insurance.
OK, it's unfortunately 175 pages long [0] instead of seven words, but that really is the gist of it. The current legislation is a more "squishy and incoherent" set of rules [1] that say you cannot give "state aid" preferentially to any company, the technicalities of which are being litigated in the ongoing Apple case.
[0] https://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-8778-2022-I... [1] https://competition-policy.ec.europa.eu/state-aid/overview_e...
What they're kind of implying is that they want multinational corporations to pay more than they receive so some other people can receive more than they pay, but they haven't actually specified who or by how much. It would be pretty silly and inefficient to deny large companies the use of government-operated transit systems or police protection, but to make it at all practical you end up creating enough exceptions that anyone can find a loophole.
I feel like the elephant in the room is this. A lot of these huge companies are monopolies or nearly so, and a large proportion of their profit is a monopoly rent. But a monopoly rent isn't attributable to a particular factory or the location of your software developers. It can't be attributed to something happening in any particular jurisdiction because it's actually attributable to something that shouldn't be happening at all, and which doesn't have any corporeal existence or physical location. So those profits naturally get declared in whichever jurisdiction has the lowest taxes.
But the problem is not that the monopoly rent is being taxed in the wrong jurisdiction or at the wrong tax rate, the problem is that the monopoly rent exists. Stop trying to pin it to a particular place and find a way to eliminate it.
EU wants apple taxed. Ireland says a tax break is not a subsidy, and a subsidy would be if they gave Apple grants, funds, or special loans
That seems odd. For example, if the government provides a national healthcare system, this is effectively a subsidy to employers who can then avoid providing a health plan their employees might otherwise demand or otherwise have to pay them more to compensate for their need to pay for their own healthcare. How is this being distinguished from any other form of subsidy? Isn't subsidizing things what governments do with tax money?
The rest of the eu has never been happy with irelands tax policy but since taxation is a national competency they can’t do anything about it directly. They can however frame it as state aid and try to attack it that way.
Edit to add, information on how state aid works in eu context: https://enterprise.gov.ie/en/what-we-do/eu-internal-market/e...
It seems impossible to avoid this. If one state spends money on something that benefits businesses and another spends it on something else, those businesses will prefer the first one. But this isn't actually that much of a problem because each state has finite resources and its people get to decide how to use them. If one wants to have a UBI (which might increase entrepreneurship and the number of small businesses engaged in taxable activity) and another wants to lower unemployment by attracting large employers with subsidies and a third just wants to have lower taxes, what's the problem? That one might actually work better than another?
This is the General Court's judgment by the way: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/en/TXT/?uri=CELEX:62...
It isn't inherently necessary to have a tax system so convoluted that these games are even possible. If you tax wages and companies employ people in your jurisdiction then they have to remit the tax. If you tax sales and people buy things in your jurisdiction then companies have to remit the tax. If you tax property and companies own property in your jurisdiction etc. etc.
The problem is governments keep trying to tax companies not based on what happens in their jurisdiction but what happens outside of it, which they can only do sometimes, and that gives the companies an opportunity to find ways to make it one of the times they can't. Just stop doing that and tax the things that actually happen in your jurisdiction.