News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on France has approved a digital services tax despite threats of retaliation by US. Parent comment

Re:France has approved a digital services tax despite threat... by rtkwe on Thursday July 11, 2019 @01:26PM (#20413485)
Double Irish with a Dutch Sandwich. Companies like google can charge their profitable branches in other countries royalties to use Google software or platform moving the profits out of a higher tax country like France into Ireland where there's little to no tax. Even after they patched the Dutch part that allowed even the marginal Irish taxes to be avoided companies can still artificially lower their profit by transferring IP to an Irish company and charging for it's use.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/double-irish-with-a-dut...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:France has approved a digital services tax despite threat... by vonmoltke on Thursday July 11, 2019 @02:04PM (#20413838)
Has any country explored options for shifting to a revenue tax to eliminate such games entirely?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:France has approved a digital services tax despite threat... by AdrianB1 on Thursday July 11, 2019 @05:19PM (#20415952)
It is done intentionally by countries like Ireland that otherwise would have zero interest from any investors. And this loophole is actually the foundation of the EU free market: you can produce something in a country, sell in another one, pay VAT in the destination country but pay profit taxes in the origin country. What France and others want is to pay profit taxes also in the destination country, on top of VAT.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:France has approved a digital services tax despite threat... by JAlexoid on Thursday July 11, 2019 @03:04PM (#20414446)
This tax is exactly that.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:France has approved a digital services tax despite threat... by rtkwe on Thursday July 11, 2019 @02:18PM (#20413980)
I don't know honestly. Seems like a tough road to go down because there are legitimate ways for a business to have high revenues relative to their profits like low margin businesses and you don't want to stamp them out accidentally targeting this kind of dodge.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:France has approved a digital services tax despite threat... by mywittyname on Thursday July 11, 2019 @04:03PM (#20415236)
Tax cross-country licensing fees at some absurd rate.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:France has approved a digital services tax despite threat... by buboard on Thursday July 11, 2019 @01:45PM (#20413658)
yes of course how did i ignore to comment. i said

> It is a protectionist / anti-tax evasion measure primarily

[ Parent | on HN ]