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Why U.S. taxpayers may pay most of the bill for Apple’s $14.5 billion tax judgment

By Henry Farrell on

The European Commission — the European Union’s main regulatory body — has hit Apple with a whopping estimated $14.5 billion bill for unpaid taxes. While the commission had been expected to rule against Apple, both Apple and the U.S. government had hoped for a much smaller amount. Here is how it happened — and why U.S. taxpayers may end up having to pay most of the bill.

Apple has taken advantage of creative tax arrangements

Apple, like many other big U.S. tech multinationals, has built its European headquarters in Ireland. There are many reasons Ireland is attractive to U.S. tech companies, including a well-educated, English-speaking workforce and friendly regulators. Still, perhaps the most crucial attraction is Ireland’s extraordinarily corporation-friendly tax system. Until very recently, it was possible for Apple to take advantage of tax arrangements that lowered its tax rate on foreign earnings very substantially. Apple located its intellectual property — the intangible assets that are at the core of its profit model — in Irish subsidiaries. These subsidiaries earned about 90 percent of Apple’s foreign profit, protecting it from tax authorities in the U.S. and elsewhere. For example, in 2011, Apple only paid somewhere between $2.1 million and $21 million in taxes in Ireland despite the fact that one Irish subsidiary accounted for 64 percent of Apple’s $34 billion in pretax income.

Now, European authorities are hitting back

Ireland’s tax policies have angered other countries in the European Union, who believe that Ireland is stealing business and siphoning off their own tax revenue. However, the European Union has only extremely limited authority over taxes, making it very difficult for these countries, or European authorities, to do anything about it. Now, however, the European Commission has come up with a clever legal strategy — interpreting Irish tax policy for multinationals as a kind of state aid to business, which the European Commission does have competences to police. The European Commission has decided that Ireland’s tax arrangements are an illegal state subsidy, which would force Ireland to reverse the subsidy by demanding back taxes from Apple.

This decision has consequences for other companies than Apple. It also has enormous consequences for the power of the European Union over tax policy. If the commission’s decision stands, it will be far harder and more politically risky for countries such as Ireland, Luxembourg or Holland to offer sweetheart deals to foreign and domestic corporations.

One way or another, U.S. taxpayers may end up footing much of the bill

The decision has consequences for U.S. politics, too. Big U.S. corporations have systematically set out to minimize their tax bills through exotic international arrangements. Many of them have accumulated huge stockpiles of money outside the U.S., which they do not want to repatriate under current tax conditions. This has caused a lot of controversy within the U.S. However, the U.S. does not want the E.U. to levy a big tax bill against Apple and other large U.S. firms. They would prefer that U.S. tax authorities get any revenue at some undefined time in the future, when Apple and other big companies repatriate their earnings.

Read the full piece at The Washington Post.

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