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miércoles, 22 de mayo de 2013

Apple: ingeniería financiera y contable para pagar menos impuestos, descentralizando sus activos e inversiones en paraísos fiscales

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/05c10598-c227-11e2-8992-00144feab7de.html







http://www.cgdev.org/blog/appletax-its-not-just-apple


   
This week the US Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations has been grilling Apple (sorry) on its tax avoidance. As with similar investigations in the UK, the subcommittee is asking whether major companies are sidestepping their obligation to pay taxes in countries where they do a great deal of business.  While it’s hard to feel sympathetic to obfuscating witnesses from multinational companies and major accounting firms, the real villain of the piece is nowhere present: the international tax system.
The subcommittee started in a strong position, having forced Apple to give up evidence on its tax strategies that senators Carl Levin and John McCain, the chair and ranking member of the committee, made public in a damning 37-page memorandum. It shows that Apple not only shifted profits to low-tax jurisdictions including Ireland, but actually managed to achieve the holy grail of tax minimisation: to earn profits that appear to occur in no tax jurisdiction:
Apple Operations International, which from 2009 to 2012 reported net income of $30 billion, but declined to declare any tax residence, filed no corporate income tax return, and paid no corporate income taxes to any national government for five years. A second Irish affiliate, Apple Sales International, received $74 billion in sales income over four years, but due in part to its alleged status as a non-tax resident, paid taxes on only a tiny fraction of that income.
Apple’s prepared response seemed to miss many of the subcommittee’s points, arguing mainly that they pay a lot of tax in the US – and offering little to justify or shed light on the subcommittee’s findings. The hearing itself was at points heated, as Sen. Levin repeatedly interrupted roundabout responses to demand specific answers. This was the second part of the subcommittee’s examination of Offshore Profit Shifting and the US Tax Code (for the first, see here).  
Meanwhile, in the UK, the Public Accounts Committee of the UK House of Commons published a report Monday on tax avoidance by multinational companies. On Tuesday, the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee took evidence from major accounting firms and leading tax justice campaigners, as part of their enquiry into ‘Taxing corporations in a global economy’.
These official probes and complementary investigative reporting by a growing number of media organisations suggest you needn’t look very far to find fairly obvious patterns of profit-shifting. Indeed, for major multinational companies, it is simply the norm. Putting one company on show is valuable to illustrate the problems for a wider audience but risks leaving the impression that particular behaviour is exceptional – when in fact there is a consistent pattern.
It’s a pattern that should, of course, concern us. Without effective taxation, state sovereignty is weakened along with state-citizen relations and the social contract. Domestic businesses suffer from an uneven playing field, as multinational companies out-compete them not on efficiency grounds but through their ability to minimise tax liabilities. Developing countries are particularly badly hit, with limited capacity to challenge abuse and a more urgent need for revenues for basic social spending.
Arguably the more interesting part of the Tuesday’s US hearing was the final session, with witnesses from the IRS and Treasury. Mark Mazur’s testimony acknowledged, albeit a little grudgingly, the scale of US tax losses to profit-shifting behavior. But he went on to argue that the current system can be saved by tweaks to transfer pricing guidelines and the ad hoc closing of some loopholes.
Trying to tax bits of a multinational group as if they were separate entities is a busted flush, relying on imaginary ‘correct’ prices for internal transfers of goods, services and intellectual property. In practice, there is increasing use of mechanisms to allocate profit without use of transfer prices. With US support, the OECD’s current work on Base Erosion and Profit Shifting could make these more coherent. The first step is basic transparency: to require public, combined and country-by-country reporting from multinational groups, so that rather than finger pointing at rotten apples, the systemic issues are laid bare.