“Like many, I have been watching the debate over the amount of tax paid by multinationals like Apple, Google and Facebook among others, operating in New Zealand. This has been running on and off over the past few years and again raised its head over the holiday period,” Murray Goldsworthy, a former retail executive, writes for The New Zealand Herald. “One of the most striking features of this debate seems to be the amount of hand wringing over how we need an international solution to this, how we are waiting to reach agreement on how it should be tackled on a global scale. This seems about as likely to occur as an agreement on global carbon dioxide production limits.”
Goldsworthy writes, “Apple has so much cash in the bank that it could pay off every residential mortgage in New Zealand and still have cash left over.”
MacDailyNews Take: We understand it’s an example to show that Apple has earned a lot of money, but it’s an unfair example that attempts to appeal to people’s emotions rather than to their intellects. Did Apple take out those mortgages? No. Are they going to pay off your mortgages? No. You are responsible for your own financial obligations. It wouldn’t be great if you took Apple’s money in order to pay off your country’s personal mortgages, it would be stealing in order to evade personal responsibility.
Goldsworthy says New Zealand should “tax multinationals based on their stated sales in New Zealand, make them show where the difference in values occurs, instead of allowing them to charge a higher cost price for their items to New Zealand subsidiaries. Make them prove why it is different, why they make substantially more elsewhere for the same items. Make them pay their fair share of tax on activity in New Zealand. Give us our bite of the Apple. It’s fair, isn’t it?”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Apple pays its legally required share of taxes in every country in which it operates, including New Zealand. Nothing is more “fair” than that. If you don’t like the laws of your country, work to change them, as Goldsworthy is trying to do with this article.