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)