“Four months after raising questions about Apple’s foreign earnings and taxes, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has ended its investigation without plans to take any further action,” Daniel Eran Dilger reports for AppleInsider.
“In June, the SEC initiated its examination of Apple’s Form 10-K filing from September 2012 just shortly after the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations had called the company’s chief executive Tim Cook to testify about Apple’s payment of taxes,” Dilger reports. “America’s intense government scrutiny of one of its most successful companies relates to the fact that Apple maintains vast overseas holdings that it will not repatriate into the U.S. because American tax laws would claim over a third of it.”
Dilger reports, “At the beginning of September, the SEC noted that it had completed its review and had no plans to take further action related to Apple’s income and tax matters.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: The U.S. corporate tax rate is obviously too high.
Under the current U.S. corporate tax system, it would be very expensive to repatriate that cash. Unfortunately, the tax code has not kept up with the digital age. The tax system handicaps American corporations in relation to our foreign competitors who don’t have such constraints on the free flow of capital… Apple has always believed in the simple, not the complex. You can see it in our products and the way we conduct ourselves. It is in this spirit that we recommend a dramatic simplification of the corporate tax code. This reform should be revenue neutral, eliminate all corporate tax expenditures, lower corporate income tax rates and implement a reasonable tax on foreign earnings that allows the free flow of capital back to the U.S. We make this recommendation with our eyes wide open, realizing this would likely increase Apple’s U.S. taxes. But we strongly believe such comprehensive reform would be fair to all taxpayers, would keep America globally competitive and would promote U.S. economic growth. – Apple CEO Tim Cook, May 21, 2013
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