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It is all well and good for Ireland, or whoever, to try to attract companies to move jobs there. But that is not what is happening. One Infinite Loop isn't in D
by eigenvector 8y ago
It is all well and good for Ireland, or whoever, to try to attract companies to move jobs there. But that is not what is happening. One Infinite Loop isn't in Dublin. What Ireland is doing is allowing companies that have a purely administrative presence in Ireland to claim tax residency in spite of having far more operations and employees in London, Paris, NYC, San Francisco, Hong Kong and numerous other high-tax places.
This allows tech companies to have their cake and eat it too by enjoying low tax rates on their entire European income without actually moving their operations to that country. If Google had 50,000 software engineers in Dublin, that would be one thing. But no one can seriously claim that any significant part of the work that produces Google Search goes on in Ireland, yet that is exactly what happens on their financial statements while they open a billion-dollar new engineering office in London.
Companies are free to move wherever they wish. They should not be free to claim they are domiciled somewhere that they plainly are not.
- purple_ducks 8y ago> no one can seriously claim that any significant part of the work that produces Google Search goes on in Ireland Hmm. Most of their European SREs who keep the service up and running are in Dublin, alongside most of their European customer support, European accountants, European legal team. Arguably, they contribute quite a lot to the success of the service. If they weren't there, would the service have made as much inroad compared to if they weren't. So, arguably, their presence is _very_ material. Also, you're missing the point of the single EU market. Ultimately, it's a game of assignment and they chose to assign their sales(& IP?) to the country that was most attractive to them.