Apple to cough up some tax
 

Re: Apple to cough up some tax
 

Won't hold my breath on hmrc getting anything more then a good lunch.

Re: Apple to cough up some tax
 

Yes its a drop in that big wide ocean out there sadly.

Re: Apple to cough up some tax
 

I heard that Apple could give everyone on the planet $20, and buy Tesco, Sainsbury's, Asda and M&S, and still be one of the richest companies in the world.

Re: Apple to cough up some tax
 

Who did you "hear" this from?

Re: Apple to cough up some tax
 

Well, Apple has over $200 billion in cash reserves, and has a market capitalisation of $591.6 billion, so it sounds quite feasible...

7 billion people times $20 = $140 billion, Tesco market cap of £12 billion ($18 billion), Sainsburys market cap of £5 billion ($7.5 billion), M&S market cap of £7.5 billion ($11.25 billion), which adds up to around $177 billion.

Asda are part of Walmart, so difficult to get a market cap for them, but if we put it between Morrisons of £3.4 billion and Sainsburys £5 billion, so make it £4 billion, or $6 billion, makes a total of $183 billion - gives them some loose change from their cash reserves of around $17 billion...

Re: Apple to cough up some tax
 

WTF LOLOLOL, Samsung paid less tax than Apple, Google Andriod paid less tax than Apple, I mean we could just mention a thousand company's lol.

Re: Apple to cough up some tax
 

Apple could buy so many companies just with their cash reserves. It makes me wonder why they didn't buy Spotify rather than try to make their own streaming service based on the Beats platform. Hell Apple could buy Disney at this point.

Re: Apple to cough up some tax
 

This is where it feels like HMRC are a little toothless. If you or I joined a tax avoidance scheme, they would be on us like flies on a pile of sugar..

Yet, when any multi national corporation sets up what is obviously a tax-avoidance scheme, they seem to spend years investigating then do very little.. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/bu...m-8794169.html

Re: Apple to cough up some tax
 

Well the likes of Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft have access to the best lawyers and accountants in the business as well as being able to exploit complex international tax law. The larger the corporations, the greater the leverage they have and the harder it is to nail them down. It's taken years for the Italians to get this far.

HMRC on the other hand...

Re: Apple to cough up some tax
 

They would rather go after Joe public as we don't have $200,000 per hour lawyers, on speed dial.

Re: Apple to cough up some tax
 

Who uses $200,000 per hour lawyers ?

Re: Apple to cough up some tax
 

Maybe a week but certainly not a hour.

Re: Apple to cough up some tax
 

Our friend is a tax partner in at one of the Big Four accountancy firms, and the most his company has paid is £1,000 per hour (which isn't cheap) for a QC who specialises in tax cases.

Re: Apple to cough up some tax
 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-37226101

I wonder if any of the Apple owning, Starbuck boycotting brigade will do likewise to the supplier of their much loved devices or whether their retaliation, on moral grounds, against the American coffee giant was more down to the inevitable presence of Costa outlets within a stone's throw than anything else.

Re: Apple to cough up some tax
 

Apple and the Irish Government will appeal so it will be interesting to see what happens.

I think the interesting issue here though is if this is the EU infringing on the Irish Government's tax affairs or if this is the only way we can get companies to pay tax since there will otherwise always be another country willing to go lower? The agreement they had was an effective tax rate of 0.005% according to the EU.

I also wonder even if Ireland's appeal fails if Apple will be made to pay up if they had a legal agreement with the Irish government or, if the agreement is illegal, if it means it never took effect. Clearly Ireland feel the continued business of Apple and others in Ireland is preferable to any windfall in back taxes.

Re: Apple to cough up some tax
 

Lawyers will get richer I suspect...

Re: Apple to cough up some tax
 

Well the US is up in arms over this claiming unfair this, that and the other as a company has been expected to pay tax. Apple and many others have been making very good profits off the back of ordinary tax paying people and seem to think they don't need to pay tax as a company. Presumedly we're supposed to be grateful to them for selling us their products expecting or asking them to contribute to the countries that allow them their profits is just plain stupid

Re: Apple to cough up some tax
 

Someone said last night apple paid 50 quid in tax for every million they made, no wonder it was found illegal...

Re: Apple to cough up some tax
 

Corporate tax is globally screwed up allowing a lot of company's to make good profits and avoid responsibility and there are always some nations willing to undercut everyone else if it means they get a little extra. Not sure this has a solution as i cannot see every country signing upto and standing by a global corporate tax agreement, but one thing that should be easier is that none of these company's get to promote themselves as responsible, ethical or any of the other rubbish they use to con consumer's.

Re: Apple to cough up some tax
 

apple maketh and the tax man taketh away -welcome to the EU you all have a nice day now :shocked:

Re: Apple to cough up some tax
 

It is ironic that it is the much maligned EU that is standing up to Apple. I cannot see this Government doing something similar.

Re: Apple to cough up some tax
 

equal misery for all -its in the charter :)

Re: Apple to cough up some tax
 

The US is up in arms :rolleyes: What a shame, such a backwards country full of sheep ran by horrid people.

As for Apple, it's a also a dying shame a company that makes profit taking ideas from elsewhere, lowers the specs of the product, adds an exclusive OS to it then charging double will have to pay tax.

Re: Apple to cough up some tax
 

They'll screw it up for themselves with greed, what's to stop government replacing corperation tax with a tax on profits made in this country?

Re: Apple to cough up some tax
 

Not sure about standing up to Apple ,It's the EU's very nature to interfere with other countries they can't help themselves ;)

Anyhoo ,who gets the tax money if Apple pay and assuming it's Ireland what's to stop them giving most of it back in rebates and tax breaks

Re: Apple to cough up some tax
 

Because that too would be illegal state aid.

I think it's a problem either way with the EU here. If they don't intervene then what is to stop a race to the bottom where large corporations pit countries against each other to get the very lowest tax rate possible without having to actually base any real part of their operations there? It's fine if it's corporation tax but that's paid for everybody and governments have expenses to cover but if it's unique to the big companies then any nation can offer a pittance of a tax rate just to get some cash and the bigger nations, who've paid for much of the state they profit from, will get nothing.

On the other hand it is intervening in tax policy.

---------- Post added at 20:35 ---------- Previous post was at 20:26 ----------

Sort of the popular but incorrect view of Apple. Most companies 'take ideas from elsewhere', Google wasn't the first search engine and Facebook wasn't the first social network. What Apple do well is execute on those ideas. Touch screen devices wasn't first with the iPhone but no one did it well before then. TouchID was miles ahead of anything on Android when it came to the iPhone. They introduced the 64 bit chip on phones a couple of years before their rivals thought it would be time (leading to the rushed disaster which was the QC 808/810 chips)

As for specs well Apple has excellent specs for the phone. The A9 chip from last September rivals, even beats, the Galaxy Note 7. They're starting to fall behind on things like the screen but when it comes to chipsets Apple are doing far more exciting things than Qualcomm. They're easily the most exciting chipset company right now although AMD are doing cool things with Polaris.

If you're interested in processors and such this is a great breakdown of the A9 chip: http://www.anandtech.com/show/9686/t...-plus-review/2

Re: Apple to cough up some tax
 

I personally think that tax should be up to the individual country ,i think it better to encourage companies with low tax levels to set up business which then increases employment and further increases the tax revenue of said country .

Re: Apple to cough up some tax
 

Well it can do and that's what corporation tax does IMO. However if you can create almost a shell entity in the lowest tax environment possible then the ultimate end result is poorer countries and richer companies. 0.005% is madness and wasn't the tax rate paid by most other Irish companies. A balance needs to be struck between the benefit you've suggested, which I agree with, without going to the extremes.

The part I do dislike though is that Apple did seem to strike this deal legally with Ireland and operate within the law so I am not sure about the retrospective element of this judgement.

To be honest the whole thing multi-national tax situation needs to be looked at. The other element here is how do you decide what is profit on a product where most of the design and development happened elsewhere.

Re: Apple to cough up some tax
 

With the world getting smaller, it's not only the tax arrangements of global companies which need to be better controlled IMHO, it's their insatiable appetite for buying up competitor and other companies to give themselves an ever bigger share of the world pie.