Apple Inc.: Reducing Tax Liability

The use of tax havens as a business motive to reduce tax liability has long been a tradition for many MNCs (Fisher 2014, p338). Recently, Apple Inc. has received worldwide attention for its tax avoidance behaviour. For instance, the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) has made an inquiry regarding Apple’s 85 million dollars income tax payment in 2015, even though the company made nearly 8 billion dollars in local revenue (Khadem 2016a). This implies that the company had avoided paying its fair share of tax because Apple’s reported profits did not align with its tax figure. Additionally, in 2006, Apple had established a small office in Reno, Nevada, in order to avoid million dollars of corporate taxes in California and 20 other states (Duhigg and …show more content…
By not claiming any tax residency, Apple has been able to avoid paying U.S taxes and Irish taxes. Apple Sales International (ASI), another Irish subsidiary of the company has reportedly avoided paying up to 17 million dollars of its daily tax in 2011-2012 (Hickey 2013). Currently, the company employs about 4,000 people and is Cork’s largest private-sector employer (Doward 2014). In 2015, Apple publicly stated its plan to expand operations in ASI and provide an additional 1000 jobs for the region of 120,000 populations (Shead 2016). Under the law, AOI and ASI are not tax residents of Ireland because they are not controlled there; simultaneously, the subsidiaries have no tax liability in the United States, because it is not incorporated there (Ting 2014, p44). These stated companies are used in Apple’s tax planning …show more content…
In 1939, Edwin Sutherland was the first criminologist to recognise the harmful actions of respectable individuals and corporations, which led to his development of the notion white-collar crime as “crimes committed by a person of respectability and high social status in the course of his occupation” (Sutherland 1983 cited in Haines and Sutton 2012, p2). Despite the broad definition established, Sutherland’s documentation of infringements made by the United States’ 70 largest corporations (Haines and Sutton 2012, p2) has highlighted the importance to examine the harms committed by corporations. Moreover, building on Sutherland’s notion, Green 1990 has identified four categories of occupational crime; these include organisational crime, state authority crime, professional crime and individual crime (Ruggiero 2007, p164). Organisational occupational crime is defined as crimes that benefit the organisation as a result of the offence (Ruggiero 2007, p164). This particular category can be used to identify tax avoidance, as its conduct provides substantial monetary benefits for the company. However, as tax avoidance is a legitimate conduct under the law, it is not labelled a crime. Therefore, the structure of the legal system has legitimised Apple’s action, driven by the pursuit of