Bernie Goldbach in Cashel | Cartoon by MacLeod.
THE SLOW AND MEASURED change to Irish multinational tax structures has started as the cacophony of criticism now blemishes Ireland's reputation.
While nobody believes Ireland is a money laundering State, the legal mechanisms codified by the Irish government (and others) make easy work of parking billions of dollars away from the hands of governments around the world. [1] The current state of distressed financial balance sheets held by democracies cry out for all countries to agree to changes that would ensure easier taxation of profits earned by multinationals. Thanks to multinationals such as Apple and Google, Ireland is regarded as a tax haven. [2] Even if everything said in briefing documents about Ireland is untrue, some of the mud has stuck and that will put the Irish government on the back foot with its European task masters.
This is a major diplomatic challenge for all nations because tax policies need to remain a domestic imperative. But as investigators around the world have shown, tax codes weren't written for the age of the telegraph. In today's internet age, those calcified tax codes haven't a hope of catching up with billions of dollars monthly of corporation profits. [3] Perhaps it's time for unitary taxation.
In a paper that will continue the meme of corporate tax through the month of June, Ireland has been named the third biggest tax haven in the world for US profits. Jim Stewart, a senior lecturer in finance at Trinity College in Dublin, claims American companies in Ireland paid tax of 4.2% on more than €80bn of net profits in 2008. [4]
1. Simon Duke -- "Apple's Rotten Core" in the Sunday Times, May 26, 2013.
2. Sarah McInerney -- "Under Fire" in the Sunday Times, May 26, 2013.
3. Brian Carey -- "Corporate tax reform will come dropping slow" in the Sunday Times, May 26, 2013.
4. Sarah McInerney -- "Ireland is third biggest US tax haven" on the front page of the Sunday Times, May 26, 2013.
5. Cliff Taylor and Ian Kehoe -- "Apple got tax deal in 1990" on the front page of the Sunday Business Post, May 26, 2013.
Bernie Goldbach teaches respect for innovative companies as part of the creative multimedia Honours degree in the Limerick School of Art & Design.
