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I am trying to think of companies that should rightfully repatriate cash back to the states, and companies that should not. Why is it that it is repulsive that
by princeb 11y ago
I am trying to think of companies that should rightfully repatriate cash back to the states, and companies that should not.
Why is it that it is repulsive that Google or Apple chooses to keep their cash overseas, whereas it is fine for Budweiser to do so (ignoring magnitudes for a second)? Because AB Inbev is Belgian? This is a difficult example for me to think of, because the US is one of the interesting countries where the largest companies here (or globally) are almost always American too.
But let's imagine for a moment that there is a company called Apple Inc that only does business in the US and nowhere else, and there is an unrelated company in France called Pomme SA, and another unrelated company called Apfel AG in Germany that happen to sell identical iPads and iPhones. Do they have a duty to transfer cash to each other and their jurisdictions? What if the CEOs of these companies travelled and met each other and went, "oh! we did not know it but we sell the same thing, let's share resources in some way", which country has a right to collect tax on the revenue of the new global organization?
The real debate is really about fairness in transfer pricing (which is difficult if not utterly boring, because typically transfer pricing are for services that are not fungible or even exchangeable in arms length markets, and so the debate within tax jurisdictions are over the nitty-gritty "economics" of the transaction in addition to consideration of foreign tax obligations yadda yadda yadda yawn), and this tax evasion through scary financial structuring like "inversion" is a really catchy thing to publicly excoriate, but it's probably not the right concern. So this is kind of a stretched example.
The point I am getting at is that many American companies aren't 100% American, and it doesn't seem like there is a good reason for insist that all foreign earned cash (from Apfel and Pomme) to be brought back to the US. I do not agree that a company like (say) Royal Dutch Shell, being one of the largest oil companies here, should repatriate cash into the US, and unanimously most of us don't think so, so this is not really the problem we should be getting angry about.
- pzone 11y agoIf these tax laws incentivize productivity-destroying mergers then they are utterly moronic, immoral even. The Pfizer CEO said he wouldn't do it but for the tax savings. All these companies want to do is bring back their cash to the US and pay their US shareholders. It's fair and defensible for Pomme to want to bring cash to France to pay its French shareholders, and for Apfel to bring it to Germany to pay its German shareholders.
- wavefunction 11y agoThese companies are free to do so. They just need to pay their taxes.
- pzone 11y agoOr as an alternative, they can invert! It really does save a lot of money.
- justincormack 11y agoActually though Apple's shareholders are in fact global. They could probably spin off a subsidiary in a tax haven like the UK and pay dividends through that.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- Retric 11y agoThe problem is R&D. If you do R&D inside the U.S. then your US proffits look much lower, and your out of country proffits look much higher, but that's an accounting fiction.
- deoptimo 11y agoAs an alternate hypothetical, lets imagine that every multinational happens to be related to a large number of subsidiaries in the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, Singapore, and Luxembourg. Furthermore, suppose that three quarters of all world-wide corporate profits happen to be booked in these four countries with a minuscule population. Clearly there would be a problem. So long as there is "greyness" in the allocation of profits among related entities, this will be systematically exploited to maximally shift profit low tax jurisdictions. Although transfer pricing is a significant component, it is not the only one. The most obnoxious methods probably relate to hybrid mismatches where corporations exploit differences in two tax codes to take deductions in both countries. This may involve a payment that is treated as interest in one country and a dividend in the other. It may involve an entity that is treated like a flow-through partnership in one country and a corporation in the other. There is also "treaty shopping" where corporations set up faux corporations in countries with favourable bilateral treaties so they may reduce their tax when shifting profits from country A to the intermediary to country B.
- eru 11y agoPerhaps the solution is not to tax profits then, but find something that's easier to grasp and define?
- DennisP 11y agoThis article didn't seem like an angry screed about what companies "should" do, so much as a pragmatic strategy to bring in more tax revenue and improve the U.S. economy.