Blogs | PAUL HEARNS:
The current round of incredulousness and hand wringing over the tax avoidance practices of several multinationals is very amusing indeed.
On the one hand there is outrage that companies such as Apple and Google, but not limited to tech (ie Starbucks), might be generating huge profits and not paying tax on them by not repatriating the cash, and then there is recrimination that countries such as ourselves and Holland (featured in the famous ‘Dutch Sandwich' of the ‘Double Irish') are facilitating these things with loopholes in our systems.
One very interesting and, it has to be said, quite naïve commentary came from the BBC's Robert Peston. This is most surprising as Peston is a long time commentator on such things. But in this article, where he quite rightly states that the storm of controversy could be bad for brand Ireland, he says that while it may be individually a good idea for these companies to take full advantage of tax avoidance, collectively it means that they are failing to contribute to the very infrastructures that produced the people who create their intellectual p...
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