‘Someone is telling porkies’ over tax paid by Apple, says Collins

Tánaiste Eamon Gilmore has repeated Government assertions that Ireland has no special deal with Apple.

“We have consistently rejected that allegation,” Mr Gilmore said in the Dáil as the controversy over Ireland’s effective corporation tax rate was raised again.

This followed the revelation last week that between 2004 and 2009 the multinational paid $36 million in tax on profits of $7.11 billion through an Irish company, but Mr Gilmore said this was based on a “flawed premise”.

Independent TD Joan Collins said Apple should have paid $890 million in tax rather than $36 million, which was "close to the 2 per cent rate that Apple claimed at the US senate hearings last year was an arrangement with Ireland".

'Repeated denials'
Ms Collins said that in the tax returns made by Apple in Australia for those years "Apple does not claim to be using its stateless tax designation. It claims to have availed of income tax at lower rates", a claim she said the Government had repeatedly denied in the last 12 months.

But she added “even a very powerful multinational company such as Apple cannot set up its own tax rates”.

The Tánaiste said, however, that the issue of effective corporation tax rates was an international one and the Government was working with the OECD, the EU and the G20 to reach a solution.

“There has been an allegation that Apple had some type of special deal with Ireland. We have consistently rejected that allegation,” he said.

"Indeed, Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, corrected the record in that regard in May last year when he stated at the All Things Digital D10 conference: 'We have no special deal with the Irish Government'."

He outlined to the Dáil “two separate scenarios that are often confused in discussions on the effective rate of corporation tax” and said the “extremely low effective rate figures recently quoted in Apple’s case and attributed to Ireland are based on a flawed premise”.

Stateless company
"We did have a problem with the issue of the stateless company. The Government recognised that loophole in our tax system and last October when we brought in the budget for 2014 we addressed and resolved it by ending the concept of stateless companies," he said. He said the approach here was "transparent".

Ms Collins said “someone is telling porkies”. The Tánaiste could not on the one hand say there was not such thing as reduced rates and on the other “there is in fact some way in which companies can get around it”.

But Mr Gilmore said the position on corporation tax was “very clear”.