“Occupying a single floor of a three-storey building in a suburban Dublin office park, Western Union’s offices are notably modest for the international headquarters of the world’s largest money transfer firm,” Padraic Halpin, Carmel Crimmins and Himanshu Ojha report for Reuters. “The set-up is typical of swathes of U.S. companies using Ireland to cut their tax bill. A Reuters analysis of Irish and U.S. filings shows that more than 40 percent of the S&P 500 have registered subsidiaries in the country.”
“That nexus, which has created over 100,000 jobs for Ireland, was laid bare when the U.S. Senate revealed that technology giant Apple had paid little or no tax on tens of billions of dollars in profits channeled through the country,” Halpin, Crimmins and Ojha report. “Ireland, which has courted U.S. business for decades, rejects the Senate’s claims that it is a tax haven, but the case has damaged its reputation as it seeks to emerge from an EU-IMF bailout and its export-focused economy dips back into recession.”
Halpin, Crimmins and Ojha report, “Company documents in Ireland and filings in the United States shows that many firms have multiple units in Ireland, where corporate income tax is 12.5 percent – about a third of the top U.S. federal income tax rate of 35 percent.”
MacDailyNews Take: There’s the problem.
Halpin, Crimmins and Ojha report, “Apple, which employs about 4,000 people in Ireland, is just one of many companies that route money through the country to cut taxes on company profits and fund investments… At least 206 of America’s largest 500 companies by market capitalization have one or more subsidiaries in Ireland, Reuters research showed.”
Read more in the full article here.
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