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posted by n1 on Thursday November 12 2015, @01:24PM   Printer-friendly
from the luxembourg-shuffle-fulfilled-by-amazon dept.

In 2012, something like US$80 billion worth of multinationals' profits worked on their suntans in Bermuda, according to an international report into profit-shuffling and tax avoidance.

Oxfam, the Tax Justice Network, the Global Alliance for Tax Justice, and Public Services International have put their heads and wallets together to fund a report into how multinationals are picking the pockets of G20 nations.

In one way, it's no surprise: the world's top economies are, pretty much by definition, the places where multinationals will make the most money. However, they also have the best resources to try and get companies to pay their taxes, and if the Oxfam et al report is accurate, they're getting gamed hand-over-fist.

The report says just twelve countries (the USA, Germany, Canada, China, Brazil, France, Mexico, India, the UK, Spain and Australia) account for 90 per cent of US multinationals' “missing” profits.

Those profits get processed through various implementations of the “Irish-Dutch sandwich” to be booked in low-tax countries like the Netherlands, Ireland, Luxembourg, Switzerland and Bermuda.

If the numbers are accurate (the report's authors put a number of caveats on the data), then between $500 and $700 billion gets shuffled around in this way, which is how Bermuda found itself home to $80 billion worth of profits in 2012 (its GDP in the same year was a paltry $5.47 billion).


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  • (Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Thursday November 12 2015, @07:40PM

    by LoRdTAW (3755) on Thursday November 12 2015, @07:40PM (#262317) Journal

    Why is Google, et al., hiding taxes somehow less bad than the NSA spying on people? Why can't both be bad?

    And second, any American should rightly be plenty pissed at both because if Google didn't pay taxes, that means the little guys paid the taxes that built the NSA spying programs. Google didn't pay their fair share.

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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday November 12 2015, @11:03PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday November 12 2015, @11:03PM (#262399) Journal

    Why is Google, et al., hiding taxes somehow less bad than the NSA spying on people?

    Do you really need me to answer that question? Do you really think it is equivalently bad to legally avoid paying some taxes rather to illegally spy on hundreds of millions of people?

    And second, any American should rightly be plenty pissed at both because if Google didn't pay taxes, that means the little guys paid the taxes that built the NSA spying programs. Google didn't pay their fair share.

    Yea, let's rage at those terrible Google people.