I thought UK had a richer talent pool, for development positions and such. I really wonder if they chose Ireland to evade tax.
Add to that the pub standards meetups, where there's regularly 1-200 people there, and I know of plenty of other people that don't travel to the events. There's a large amount of talent in Dublin, and I would imagine all the other cities in Ireland too.
And two of the world's top ten universities are in commuting distance. At a guess London's student population is larger than Ireland's too, and besides the aforementioned Oxford and Cambridge, London has two other top 100 universities, King's and Imperial.
The talent pool they'll be hiring from will probably be the EU anyway.
The popular one at the moment being The Double Irish (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement) which Google, Amazon and Starbucks have been using very successfully recently.
Not suggesting this is necessarily what Dropbox are going to do but it might enable something like this, should they wish to.
Not forgetting:-
Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, Pfizer, Adobe
(amongst others).
"Tax evasion" is not paying tax that you must pay. "Tax avoidance" is finding ways to not be liable for the tax in the first place.
It'll be interesting to see what they do with the profits from their companies (both the US and Ireland).
If they keep a chunk of income in Ireland and only transfer it to the US during tax amnesties then that's one standard form of avoidance.
If the US Dropbox entity starts paying a large sum of to Dropbox Ireland in order to license some part of the technology then we're in to the cunning world of tax avoidance proper.
> Tax avoidance is seeking to minimise a tax bill without deliberate deception (which would be tax evasion) but contrary to the spirit of the law. It therefore involves the exploitation of loopholes and gaps in tax and other legislation in ways not anticipated by the law. Those loopholes may be in domestic tax law alone, but they may also be between domestic tax law and company law or between domestic tax law and accounting regulations, for example. The process can also seek to exploit gaps that exist between domestic tax law and the law of other countries when undertaking international transactions.
(I'm a former tax accountant, at KPMG - these definitions are uncontroversial AFAIK)
Not exactly the same as Starbucks/Google: they are starting right now to provide a service, they need to leverage everything.