Dear Jacques (i'll stop with the game now ;) - I really emphatise with the social responsibility part of the story. The game Apple is playing with stored cash abroad is abject. Nobody is profiting from that.
But we can agree that it's not the nature of a corporation to pay more taxes than necessary? If people offer you crazy deals: agree. Governments should coordinate not to make crazy offers and perhaps even tit-for-tat those that do.
The social responsibility part is what it is all about. If corporations use their legal and bargaining power to opt-out of the social contract then everybody will lose. There is such a thing as being too big and I firmly believe that most multinationals are no longer playing by the rules in the sense that they violate the spirit of those rules whereever they can by focusing solely on the letter of the rules.
That's a game that may work in the short term but the long term consequences are pretty grave, especially since there seems to be a concentrating effect of such moves where more and more control is ceded to ever fewer companies.
It will be hard enough to maintain a tax base that can keep the lights on in a country as it is with all the change coming our way, creating playing field differences like these between SME's and behemots is going to erode that tax base very quickly.
That depressing truth has a way of manifesting. I'm not quite sure what to feel about it. Our attempts here are futile. We're not going to get any legislation passed.
The fact is, companies can opt out of the social contract. They are big, and they're going to play by different rules. But I don't think that's strange -- that's just life.
It happens in China and Russia. Why should the US, Canada, or Europe be any different?
The only realistic thing I see is if enough employees at a company start an effort then maybe one of the large tech companies can be a leading light in exposing tax loopholes and try to inflict PR damage on other companies that use them.
We are not ants, the users of this board are often really important parts of the largest companies that exist today.
Well, occasionally a bunch of us decide to be fire ants instead, and bite back. Messy but seems to be inevitable given that "profit motive" has no shame to be called upon.
As an individual person, if a law has a loophole, is it ok to exploit that? Say you found a loophole that allowed you to legally get away with murder, is it now ok to commit murder as long as you comply with the loophole? I would argue that what is right and what is legal are never fully aligned, and that the excuse "it was legal" is not a valid defense for committing immoral acts.
Corporations are social constructs, they are entirely made of people. Those people don't stop having a moral imperative to do right by others just by having an employee badge. Just as we require individuals to remain "decent human beings", regardless of what they can legally get away with, we need corporations to remain "decent social citizens". While it is not illegal to maximize profits through tax evasion, it is anti-social, and therefore we shouldn't encourage or applaud that behavior.
Governments should coordinate not to make crazy offers and perhaps even tit-for-tat those that do.
A preferable alternative would be for customers to consider a company's ethics in their purchasing decisions, and to encourage their peers to do the same. If it became socially unacceptable to have a new iPhone because of Apple's choice to pay such a trivial amount of tax (legal or otherwise, that's besides the point) you can be absolutely certain Apple would quickly stop funnelling money to tax havens, and they'd probably have a big marketing drive about how much they care about paying tax to fund better wages and welfare for soldiers, teachers and nurses too.
Social pressure is far more powerful than governments. It's just harder to 'control'.
no, they'd have another smear campaign about the governments interference and get the populus to vote to abolish any kind of taxes just for apple.
and they'd probably succeed as well, considering how delusional and outspoken apple zealots are.
The problem is that there are now so few corporations, that you would actually have to opt out of having a smart phone entirely, since I believe Google probably does similar things (not sure of what the latest is).
That's a quite modern idea, businesses can be socially responsible, but somehow the recent thinking is that they should dodge as much tax as possible because somehow that's their priority.
It's a moral decision to dodge tax, not a requirement that their shareholders can sue over. That's just a (very thin) excuse.
But we can agree that it's not the nature of a corporation to pay more taxes than necessary? If people offer you crazy deals: agree. Governments should coordinate not to make crazy offers and perhaps even tit-for-tat those that do.