Cantillon: Taxing question could reap gold for Ireland

Taxing multinationals was back in the news again this week.

In the US the Obama administration is working on schemes to combat too-clever-by-half profit shifting, while the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development is toiling away on its tax base erosion initiative. The subject of corporation tax was also on the agenda for the G20 in Australia.

Here in Dublin, Richard Bruton said the international debate on overly aggressive tax planning had to be resolved by way of international co-operation and that the process might have benefits for Ireland.

Perhaps part of the answer is the type of tax structures run by companies such as Google and Apple, whereby their operations here make such sizeable payments to associated companies in Caribbean tax havens. Has this weakened the growth in corporation tax receipts that might have otherwise occurred?

Any measures that emerged that put an end to such practices could well see sizably larger profits being booked, and taxed, here.

In Australia for the G20 meeting, the head of the International Monetary Fund, Christine Legarde, said governments need to look at "new concepts" to combat schemes in which some companies are shifting their profits to avoid paying the sort of contributions governments would like to see them doing. She singled out accounting for revenues from new global digitised businesses such as Google and Apple as a "big ongoing problem".

Asked how much money is being lost in tax revenues to global tech companies, she answered: “There are conflicting numbers but all of them are big.”

As this newspaper reported last year, Facebook Ireland paid Irish corporation tax of €1.9 million on turnover of €1.78 billion in 2012, while Google's Irish-based operation paid €17 million in Irish corporation tax on turnover of €15.5 billion.

There could be gold in them there hills.