Then Ireland should be paying the bill... It's like punishing a student for having a hall pass a teacher admitted writing.

There was a discussion yesterday about this on HN. It's pretty much a corporations responsibility to try to avoid as much tax legally as it can. In this case, Ireland gave them LEGAL tax break (at least that was what the Irish believed at the time) and now Apple is getting blamed..?

It just doesn't make sense, put the blame where the blame is due.

> Then Ireland should be paying the bill.

There's certainly some merit to that argument.

> It's pretty much a corporations responsibility to try to avoid as much tax legally as it can.

That's a popular falsehood. It is a corporation's responsibility to fulfill the wishes of its shareholders. That doesn't even necessarily mean maximizing profits, and it certainly doesn't mean avoiding taxes to a degree that incurs both legal and reputational risk. If the shareholders want the company to act as a mature and respectable person would, then the corporation's duty is to do so.

Its not even close to a falsehood...

Unless Apple's a benefit corporation, it's only responsiblity to share holders is long and short term profit. I distinguish between the two to make the point that it shouldn't break laws or go out if business because that hurts long term profits, it also should avoid taxes it can, and pay all taxes it can't avoid to maximize short term profits, and minimize longer term tax penalties.

You're simply wrong, in a way that only a person who has never cracked open a book on corporate law or history could be. Profit is not, and never has been, the only duty of a corporation. Corporations routinely forego opportunities to maximize profit, even in ways they believe they could get away with, for the sake of safety or social/environmental responsibility or even crazier reasons (e.g. faux religious freedom). Activist shareholders of the Trump/Shkreli variety might try to sue for that, but their record of success is spotty at best because the people who are actually in the courtroom have a more mature understanding.

Ugh, it's kind of ironic you bring this up, because I'm actually pretty familiar with corporate law... I'm particularly well versed in taxes, as well as wealth management.

Dodge v. Ford Motor Co., 170 N.W. 668, 684 (Mich. 1919)

> A business corporation is organized and carried on primarily for the profit of the stockholders. The powers of the directors are to be employed for that end. The discretion of directors is to be exercised in the choice of means to attain that end, and does not extend to a change in the end itself, to the reduction of profits, or to the nondistribution of profits among stockholders in order to devote them to other purposes.

Although, there are examples where a court did recognize that helping employees will maximize profit, or not putting up bright lights next to a neighborhood is "moral". All of the decisions had to relate back to helping the shareholders. Most courts in the U.S. view shareholder profit as the #1 responsibility of the board of directors, others argue public safety might be #1, profits #2.

All of them agree that the primary purpose is to make/maximize profits, without which you can do nothing.

The primary purpose is to make/maximize profits because that's what the shareholders want, not as an essential part of being a corporation. Instead of trying to explain concepts like "duty of care" and "duty of loyalty" and "business judgment" further myself, I'll just leave that to someone better qualified.

https://medium.com/bull-market/there-is-no-effective-fiducia...

Perhaps it's more like punishing a student for cheating in an exam with a cheat sheet that some teacher wrote.

No it's like the teacher told them the answers, then said "HAHA, caught you cheating"

Then lets sanction all murders by state in Syria, because they are only murdering traitors and terrorists so it's LEGAL also because they say so. There is something like international law in case of Syria and there is something like EU law for member countries. While being a member of EU you have access to whole EU market. So no, what they did was ILLEGAL. Apple exactly knew what they were doing and knew it was against EU law, they only thought they will get away with it.

IIRC, they will pay the bill in the form that they will collect Apple's money to help pay part of the national debt.

Ireland will probably not see a penny from it.

Got a source from Bloomberg[1]:

    The government maintains that even if it were to take the
    cash, European rules mean it would have to use the money
    to pay down some of its 180 billion euros of national debt 
    rather than fund spending.

[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-30/why-irelan...