Hacker News Reader

Comment by techpression | Hacker News Reader

Why is it Apple that has to pay for what Ireland did wrong? Genuinely curious here, it's not like Ireland is some random dude on the internet selling stolen goods and Apple should've known better.

View on HN

I think this is a common practice in every country. If the tax payer is at fault, the tax payer pays. If the treasury is at fault, the tax payer still pays.

I guess it's within the power of legislation that the wrongly calculated taxes are now corrected.

Sure, but Ireland doesn’t get the money, the EU does, so it’s not actually correcting the taxes but rather redistribute them, which seems like a bit of totalitarian approach to regulation. Ireland did not want the money back.

Ireland gets the money. The EU is making Apple pay us. And yes we didn't want it - mainly for reputational reasons and partly because our argument was "we never done it".

I stand corrected then, thanks. I was under the assumption this is like most legal wins for the EU that it goes into the pot to lower member fees.

oversimplified you can think of it as

Ireland is required to collect the taxes it always should have collected

(but waved to get a competitive advantage for attracting tech giants and giving them in turn a competitive advantage over EU based competition)

as a side note tax benefits to attract companies aren't perse illegal but what Ireland did went far beyond what is healthy/acceptable for the EU

First line of the judgement: “Ireland granted Apple unlawful aid which Ireland is required to recover”

But Ireland refused, so the fault still lies with Ireland in this case. I mean the EU is full of tax elimination or subsidies for targeted companies, far beyond this case, so it seems that this is more about Apple than the actual taxes.

What are you arguing exactly? This isn't punishment or fine, this is paying what they should have all along.

The target of the case is wrong, it should be Ireland, not Apple. Many companies have unique (to them) tax benefits across the entire EU, some hidden under things like “electricity subsidies”. If the company pay what the country mandates, then the rest should be between the country and the EU, not the EU and the company.

The target for this case is Ireland. They lost the case and now need to fix what they charged wrongly. Again, what are you arguing about?

The argument is that because Ireland needs to recover money from Apple, Apple is going to have to pay that money, hence Apple is getting punished.

They are not getting punished, as far as I know no fine whatsoever is required against them.

Paying your taxes, even if late, is not a punishment.

They are setting up an example for other companies doing same. Fuck with EU taxes, we will fuck you up (and lets be honest here, 13 billions absolutely nothing for Apple given 500+ million wealthy market they cater to).

Law often does that to perpetrators. Ireland tried to save the shady deal by refusing the money it should have received (corruption in plain sight, with these sums its not unexpected it goes to highest places plus something about saving nation's public face), so this is how they got about it.

Not sure its 100% best process but overall a very good move and precedent for future.

€13,000,000,000 is not “absolutely nothing”. It’s almost twice the entire EU defence fund budget.

And just to be clear.. this is really an example of how badly Apple were actively robbing society through their tax avoidance bullshit.

> It’s almost twice the entire EU defence fund budget.

The EU defence spend in 2022 was €240 billion.

That’s very interesting but not what I said.

https://defence-industry-space.ec.europa.eu/eu-defence-indus...

True, but IMO it's a bit misleading because you were using as a point of comparison something that sounded like the military budget of Europe without specifying that it's something completely different (that people probably never heard of — at least I didn't and neither did my grandparent). I'm not saying it's intentional or anything, just wanted to point it out.

If you're referring to a single pot of money that exists to support Research and Development, you would typically refer to that as "The European Defence Fund" as "entire EU defence fund budget" would be interpreted differently.

That is the amount spent by EU member states on defence; not what the EU itself spent.

"13 billions absolutely nothing for Apple"

LOL no there is not a single company or person in the world for whom 13 BILLION dollars is 'absolutely nothing'.

> LOL no there is not a single company or person in the world for whom 13 BILLION dollars is 'absolutely nothing'.

Apple's revenue last year alone was $383 Billion.

Isn't that more than the EU defence budget from 2022? Not gonna lie, I'm kinda a little scared now. I realise that there's less than a 1 in 1 billion chance Apple is gonna set up its own military and attack the EU, but still...

The EU doesn't have "defence budget", the EU isn't a sovereign country, the EU doesn't have any armed forces.

What EU does have is the European Defence Agency (EDA) which is a body that organises collective projects and coordination on behalf of its members.

The EDA's budget in 2023 was €44.8Bn.

Combined defense budgets of all individual member states was 214 billion in 2023. That's 'spending budget', not revenue like the 300 something billion of Apple's revenue cited above.

This means 3.39% of their worldwide revenue, and an even bigger share of their profits. It's not negligible at all, even though it's just collecting taxes late without a penalty.

" and Apple should've known better."

Of course Apple should've known better. Their lawyers warned them about the risks of these deals (I do not have internal knowledge, I just know they did, they do to everyone who enters into deals like this). For years (rather, decades) everybody bet on this being too widespread to be corrected like it is now. You can't really blame them for trying, but in the end, this is the corporate/tax version of 'fuck around, find out'.

Apple is selling to the whole of EU. Is it unreasonable to conclude that they should have known to follow the EU laws rather engaging in a tax scheme offered by Ireland?

I'm not entirely sure what to think myself about the fairness of this. But going forward I definitely prefer that corporations will have to be careful about engaging in unfair tax deals in the EU.

Otherwise those corporations would just be looking for the next country to take advantage of - risk free.

Amazon got away with it and so did Fiat, smaller sums and in Luxembourg and Netherlands, still, company specific tax deals based in country specific laws. Apple clearly picked the wrong horse, but unless there’s actual reform (which will likely cause a whole slew of other issues) the tax setup of multinational companies will carry on, maybe not risk free, but it’s still a win for them long term no matter what.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com