Now that the French government tax administration has concluded its multi-year audit on Apple, the total amount that Apple must pay is $571 million. The details will be published in the public accounts according to an Apple statement. Apple has been asked to pay back taxes in this case. In 2016, the European Commission ordered Apple to pay $14.5 billion in unpaid taxes to the Irish government, because it had been granted illegal tax benefits.
The EU said that Apple has paid and effective corporate tax rate of 0.005 percent on profits in Europe in 2014. Here at Classiarius, we are not tax lawyers and are not well versed in EU law but that 0.005 percent sounds a bit low. The content of this article was sourced from a CNBC article published February 5, 2019 by Shulze.
Surely this small injection of back taxes from Apple will help the French budget as the costs for a wide range of policies by President Macron are costing a lot of taxpayer monay. Now the EU is stepping up and said that online revenues of tech companies like Apple, Google, Amazon and Facebook will be 3 percent, a number much higher than that 0.005 percent mentioned earlier. Currently the tech giants are under a lot of external pressure and will likely come under more accounting checks in the near future.
Team Classiarius
