Dropbox moves to Ireland for all customers outside of North America
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dropbox.com
Irelands corporation tax rate is 12.5%, in the US the rate is often cited as 30% and similarly with France and Germany. However the "effective" corporate tax rate is actually lower than Irelands in many cases because there are many write offs and loop holes that mean companies rarely pay 30% and much closer to 8%. These writes offs and loop holes aren't really as available in Ireland and subsequently mean Irelands tax scheme is more transparent in the sense the perceived value is closer to the actual value.
It's just a competitive and transparent tax policy that has been in place since 1960's. A lot of people here and in the media will use this as evidence that Ireland is a tax haven. I'll concede measures like the Double Irish were a step too far -- a 12.5% rate isn't. If Dropbox really wanted to I'm sure they could find plenty of write offs in the UK like Starbucks did. There might be other factors influencing this decision too though e.g. avoiding the UK because a Brexit is on the table. Ireland has a better climate for data centres compared to say the Cayman Islands.
By the way companies have 6 years to change their structure so the Double Irish still exists.
[0]: https://www.dropboxforum.com/hc/communities/public/questions...
"Tax evasion" is crossing over a not very well defined and continually shifting line - and is illegal.
At the moment, at least from where I see the world here in Australia, all the "global tech giants" (and mining/resource ones too) are doing a significantly better job of navigating the shifting tax rules across various national tax jurisdictions to minimize their tax obligations - than the governments and bureaucracies are doing of collecting "fair" taxes from them. Our local popular press is full of stories of FaceBook/Google/Apple paying zero tax in Australia because they can structure their invoicing/payments to and from different parts of the same global corporate entity – in entirely legal ways that result in zero tax owing in Australia.
I'd think less of Dropbox's senior management and advisor team if they weren't trying to take advantage of the same loopholes.
It's "Modern Corporation 101" grade stuff - "Maximise shareholder value by whatever means won't put the company directors in jail. Don't talk about ethics or fairness or duty to society (except in the Marketing Department and advertising). Talk about duty to shareholders and what's close enough to technically legal that our lawyers will sign off on it."
Maybe it's just me, but for me, the problem is our political system - it's not designed to withstand these corrupting forces. Some countries deal with it slightly better, but barely just.
I like competitive capitalism. I like democracy, and even the idea of a representative democracy. But they don't play well together when you have the capitalists ultimately deciding who gets to represent the people, and then those representatives bending in every which way to make things easier for their funders. When you have a system that rewards bribery, or has in its place a revolving door between legislators and business, you're going to have these effects. The solution to this I think is really rather simple, but I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader.
What is despicable is that we all pay more taxes than our governments should actually need if they spent the money they took from us wisely.
It's not like "better service" is a driving force behind any government, ever.
In addition unless Microsoft wins its appeal US courts have ruled that a US company eg: Dropbox can be forced to provide any data they have even if it is outside the US
I'd suggest "ideology" is a much more powerful motivator here.
(When she joined Dropbox, there was a huge fooforaw over whether her actions under Bush during the Iraq War constituted war crimes. Honestly I felt like that was a red herring in this particular case--regardless of your feelings the war, it should be obvious that you don't want even partial control of your private documents going to a person who thinks that the government should be allowed to read your private documents.)
That's a bit of an overstatement. I think what you mean is every huge tech company or something along those lines. And I doubt it is even true for every member of that cohort. Though you are of course correct that it is common.
There are plenty of companies registered in Ireland which do not have a physical presence here. There is no test of what proportion of business activity occurs in Ireland.
For example Norwegian Airlines has something like a dozen " brass plaque" companies registered to a solicitor's address in Dublin but the only time their 787s touch Irish soil is on their delivery flight, to receive their EI- registration
Some people are paranoid enough to encrypt cross connects within the same facility that run between cages or floors, which is a sad state of affairs (but, in my opinion, sensible).
There is nothing to be gained by continually making judgement calls about which communications need to be secure and which don't. Like a lot of other technology, security needs to become pervasive so we can all take it for granted and worry about productive problems.
* A significant number of encryption technologies are broken or achievably breakable by the NSA
* The NSA has already or could easily acquire encryption keys from any large tech company with a court order in one of the secret courts
* The NSA has vast means for illicit access into systems and networks
I much prefer the privacy policies of more secure services, which tend to say things like "we do not have the ability to access your data under any circumstances".
I had a client who pulled all their (encrypted) data off the Ninefold cloud (Ninefold were at the time a fully Australian owned and hosted company) when they leased data center space and opened an office in CA – due to data sovereignty concerns.
In fact Dropbox is doubly at risk, law enforcement or national security could target either (or both) Dropbox themselves - go straight to Amazon to get access at hypervisor level to their entire infrastructure.
12.5℅ corporation tax. We're not a tax haven, our rate is just at a sweeter spot. This policy was introduced by an taoiseach (prime minister) Sean Lemass during the 60's to stimulate economic recovery from one of the worst recessions we ever faced. The goal was to attract foreign investment and in particular from American companies that wanted to get a foothold in Europe. This guy is sort of revered in Ireland and everyone that takes Junior Certificate History (ages 12-15ish) learns about him. He's a pretty interesting leader because he was almost singlehandedly responsible for developing our country into a modern, global economy through various policies, plans and schemes.
European Law, I'm no expert in law but as far as I know our data protection laws are well established. Let's put it this way, our own government definitely isn't trying to keep track of your visits to the toilet. Although we're paranoid that the US probably is, or at least they want to!
Climate - funnily enough our famously terrible weather has an upside. The cost of cooling a data centre is cheaper. Our country isn't incredibly cold but it never really gets hot here either. Temperatures throughout the year are relatively stable.
As a CS student with only 1 year left to graduate I couldn't be happier with the 'mini tech bubble' we're experiencing. It's practically the only sector that's seeing significant growth and wage increases in the last few years. The economic crash in 2008 had a severe effect on the country as a whole. Fast forward to today - employment in software development, engineering and other related fields is being created quicker than they can find suitable candidates. I'm happy knowing that while so many other young people are being forced to immigrate, our tech sector is so saturated with jobs that CS grads like myself are being headhunted.
Gee, if only Microsoft OneDrive would have a decent Linux client.
And then, oh doing integrity checking at the other end would suck.