When it was reported recently that Apple has avoided paying U.S. corporate income taxes on tens of billions of dollars by claiming the money really belonged to its Irish subsidiary, the hope was that Congress would use the revelation to seriously look at closing these tax loopholes used by multinational corporations.
But, of course, our Congress is pathetically impotent to deal with the real problems of the country. It’s too busy playing politics ALL THE TIME. Plus, Apple is an influential company and it isn’t doing anything that other influential multinational corporations aren’t doing.
So instead of our Congress addressing this tax issue we might just have to rely on Ireland to fix the problem because Apple hardly paid any tax to that country on all those billions. Why? Because Irish tax law says that to be taxable income the corporate decisions have to be made in Ireland, which, of course, they aren’t in Apples’ case.
The Ireland Independent exposed Apples’ tax avoidance in that county with a story yesterday under the heading, “Biggest Irish companies paid tax at eight times Apple’s rate”.
And if Apple ticking off the Irish business community isn’t bad enough, the President of the Irish Catholic Bishops’ Conference, Archbishop Sean Cardinal Brady, signed a letter to the leaders of the G8 countries this week addressing tax evasion and taxation. The letter cited the Catechism of the Catholic Church:
“Submission to authority and co-responsibility for the common good make it morally obligatory to pay taxes…” (No. 2240).
Now if we can only get the leprechauns to rise up against Apple, we can shut down at least this one offshore tax haven.
