Apple Didgeridon’t Pay Their Australian Taxes, Investigators Claim

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Tim Cook, Phil Schiller and others sold Apple stock at a time when it was hitting record highs.
Tim Cook, Phil Schiller and others sold Apple stock at a time when it was hitting record highs.

Apple has been accused of shifting close to $8.1 billion in untaxed profits from its Australian operations to Ireland over the past ten years.

An investigation by the Australian Financial Review got hold of a decade’s worth of financial accounts for the Irish-based “Apple Sales International” — which supposedly show how Apple shifted untaxed profits from Australia to Ireland, where the company pays just 0.7% tax on its turnover.

In 2013, Apple recorded pre-tax earnings of just Aus$88.5 million after sending an estimated Aus$2 billion in Australian sales to Ireland — via Singapore.

Last year Apple was grilled by the U.S. Senate on “extensive tax-avoidance strategies” after allegedly sidestepping billions of dollars each year on its worldwide tax bill.

Apple is, of course, far from the only global company to be accused of similar practices.

Ahead of a recent G20 finance ministers meeting in Sydney — designed to crack down on international tax avoidance — IMF chief Christine Lagarde said that accounting for global digital businesses like Apple and Google pose a “big ongoing problem and process”.

Source: AFP

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