Hasta La Creative!

Plenty of news outlets have written about how certain U.S. tech companies route their revenues through Ireland to minimize their tax payments. But now the Australian Financial Review has some hard numbers related to the controversial practice, having gotten its hands on “10 years worth of financial accounts for Apple Sales International, the secretive Irish company at the heart of Apple’s international tax arrangements.”

Though many of the numbers in the report, by AFR investigative journalist Neil Chenoweth, are specific to the Australian market, they shed light on how extraordinarily advantageous it is for Apple to shift money from its subsidiaries around the world into Ireland — which also, of course, minimizes Apple’s tax burden in its home country, the U.S. “Last year,” the AFR says, “Apple reported pretax earnings in Australia of only $88.5 million after it sent an estimated $2 billion of income from its Australian sales to Ireland via Singapore, where Apple negotiated a secret tax deal in 2009.” (The money sent to Ireland is described as technology royalties and payments for other “intangibles.”)

To put that another way, “Apple Sales International has reported more than $US100 billion of profits in the last five years. Its accounts show it has paid less than 50 cents in tax on every $1,000 of income.”

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