Ireland to Formally Appeal $14 Billion Apple Tax Ruling This Week
Ireland's government will this week formally submit an appeal against the European Commission's ruling that it must collect 13 billion euros in unpaid back taxes from Apple, according to Ireland's finance minister Michael Noonan.
"The government fundamentally disagrees with the European Commission's analysis and the decision left no choice but to take an appeal to the European Courts and this will be submitted tomorrow," Noonan told a European Parliament committee in Brussels on Tuesday.
Ireland agreed in September to join Apple in its fight against the European Commission, which in August said the iPhone maker received illegal state aid from the country. The ruling followed a three-year inquiry that found Apple paid between only 0.005% and 1% in taxes in Ireland between 2003 and 2014, compared to the country's headline 12.5% corporate tax rate.
Ireland is looking to protect its tax regime that has benefited several multinational corporations, according to Reuters.
Apple previously said it is "confident" the ruling "will be overturned" by European courts, but noted the process is "likely to take several years." Apple said it has "provisioned several billion dollars for the U.S. for payment," but it does not expect any near-term impact on its financial results.
Apple insists it is "the largest taxpayer in the world" and "follows the law and pays all of the taxes" it owes in each country it operates. Apple CEO Tim Cook has described the tax accusations as "total political crap," and said the lower-end 0.005% tax rate calculated by the European Commission is a "false number."
Note: Due to the political nature of the discussion regarding this topic, the discussion thread is located in our Politics, Religion, Social Issues forum. All forum members and site visitors are welcome to read and follow the thread, but posting is limited to forum members with at least 100 posts.
Popular Stories
Apple will adopt the same rear chassis manufacturing process for the iPhone SE 4 that it is using for the upcoming standard iPhone 16, claims a new rumor coming out of China. According to the Weibo-based leaker "Fixed Focus Digital," the backplate manufacturing process for the iPhone SE 4 is "exactly the same" as the standard model in Apple's upcoming iPhone 16 lineup, which is expected to...
Key details about the overall specifications of the iPhone 17 lineup have been shared by the leaker known as "Ice Universe," clarifying several important aspects of next year's devices. Reports in recent months have converged in agreement that Apple will discontinue the "Plus" iPhone model in 2025 while introducing an all-new iPhone 17 "Slim" model as an even more high-end option sitting...
Apple typically releases its new iPhone series around mid-September, which means we are about two months out from the launch of the iPhone 16. Like the iPhone 15 series, this year's lineup is expected to stick with four models – iPhone 16, iPhone 16 Plus, iPhone 16 Pro, and iPhone 16 Pro Max – although there are plenty of design differences and new features to take into account. To bring ...
Apple is scaling back its Hollywood spending after investing over $20 billion in original programming with limited success, Bloomberg reports. This shift comes after the streaming service, which launched in 2019, struggled to capture a significant share of the market, accounting for only 0.2% of TV viewership in the U.S., compared to Netflix's 8%. Despite heavy investment, critical acclaim,...
Last Friday, a major CrowdStrike outage impacted PCs running Microsoft Windows, causing worldwide issues affecting airlines, retailers, banks, hospitals, rail networks, and more. Computers were stuck in continuous recovery loops, rendering them unusable. The failure was caused by an update to the CrowdStrike Falcon antivirus software that auto-installed on Windows 10 PCs, but Mac and Linux...