Tag Archives: Tax Haven

Profits.

Not people.

The research from academics at the University California, Berkeley and the University of Copenhagen estimates that foreign multinationals shifted $106 billion (€90 billion) of corporate profits to Ireland in 2015.

This was more than all of the islands of the Caribbean combined ($97 billion/€83 billion), and well ahead of Singapore ($70 billion/€60 billion), Switzerland ($58 billion/€49 billion) and the Netherlands ($57 billion/€48 billion), according to the researchers.

By our estimates, Ireland is the number one shifting destination,” the paper states.

Until the 1990s, Ireland used to collect relatively little corporate tax revenue, about 1.5 per cent to 2 per cent of national income – significantly less than the US,” the paper says.

“Then, as profit shifting surged, so did tax collection: since the mid 1990s, Ireland has collected significantly more corporate tax revenue (as a fraction of national income) than the US – about twice as much in 2015.

Meanwhile…

The Department of Finance said:

“Ireland is not a ‘tax haven’ and does not meet any of the international standards for being considered such.”

Ireland is the world’s biggest corporate ‘tax haven’, say academics (irish Times)

Yesterday.

Davos, Switzerland

In a panel that included Taoiseach Leo Varadkar (top), Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki (centre)…

…made an emotive plea for reform – saying EU “tax havens” should be abolished in a thinly veiled swipe at Ireland. He linked his country’s history with Communism to the issue, saying history made it even more important that there be a “level playing field” when it comes to tax.

Starts at 36 seconds.

Under siege: world leaders take ‘tax haven’ swipe at us (Independent.ie)

00120603He’s on to us.

“What we are trying to do is to say that if you simply acquire a small company in Ireland or some other country to take advantage of the low tax rate [and] you start saying, ‘we are now magically an Irish company’, despite the fact that you might have only 100 employees there and you have got 10,000 employees in the United States, you are just gaming the system.

President Obama on CNBC

RUN!

Obama names Ireland in attack on tax policies of US firms (Simon Carswell, Irish Times)

(Mark Stedman/Photocall Ireland)

Enda Kenny, in Davos last week:

“Ireland’s not a tax…ehhh…you know, eh, haven for unorthodox practice in respect of tax. It’s very clear, it’s very transparent.”

Not so fast.

Last Friday, the Congressional Research Service, which works for the US Congress, identified Ireland as a tax haven in a new report. American public interest research group, the Citizens for Tax Justice, say:

“A new report from the non-partisan Congressional Research Service (CRS) finds that U.S. corporations report a huge share of their profits as officially earned in small, low-tax countries where they have very little investment and workforce while reporting a much smaller percentage of their profits in larger, industrial countries where they actually have massive investments and workforces. The report confirms that U.S. corporations are artificially inflating the proportion of their global profits that are generated in small, lowtax countries — in other words, shifting their profits to tax havens.”

“CRS looked at the location of foreign profits, as reported by U.S.-based multinationals in surveys conducted by the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis. CRS’s report focused on five small countries generally considered to be tax havens (the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Ireland, Bermuda and Switzerland) and compared them to five of the top “traditional” foreign countries where American companies actually do business (Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom, Australia and Mexico). The results are striking.”

Read more here.

Thanks Mark Malone
(RTÉ)