Apple paid $6 billion in U.S. federal income taxes, 1/40th of all corporate income taxes collected by U.S. government in 2012

“Congressional investigators are wrapping up an inquiry into the accounting practices of Apple and other technology companies that allocate revenue and intellectual property offshore to lower the taxes they pay in the United States,” Charles Duhigg and David Kocieniewski report for The New York Times. “The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations inquiry now drawing to a close began more than a year ago and involves at least a half dozen technology companies, according to people with firsthand knowledge of it, who declined to be identified.”

“Those people said the subcommittee had subpoenaed or otherwise asked the companies to explain methods they used to avoid domestic taxes,” Duhigg and Kocieniewski report. “They said Apple had become a focus of the inquiry and was cooperating with the subcommittee, which is expected to issue wide-ranging recommendations that are likely to play a significant role in Congressional tax code negotiations. Tech companies are able to easily shift ‘intellectual property, and the profit that goes along with it, to tax havens,’ said a former Treasury Department economist, Martin A. Sullivan. ‘Apple went out of its way to try and ensure that its tax savings didn't attract too much public attention, because tax avoidance of that magnitude - even though it's legal and permissible - isn't in keeping with the image of a socially progressive company.’”

MacDailyNews Take: Apple “went out of its way” to legally fulfill their fiduciary duty to their millions upon millions of shareholders worldwide. If you don’t like the laws, change them. How about lawmakers ignore special interests, lobbyists, and campaign contributions and do what’s right for a change? (We know: Ridiculous pipe dream.)

Don’t blame people for following the laws as scribbled, crossed-out and re-scribbled by a decades-long parade of chuckleheads; run through with loopholes into loopholes on top of loopholes.

The problem isn’t Apple Inc. The problem is the tax code.

Duhigg and Kocieniewski report, “In its statement, Apple said it paid ‘an enormous amount of taxes’ to local, state and federal governments. ‘In fiscal 2012 we paid $6 billion in federal corporate income taxes, which is 1 out of every 40 dollars in corporate income taxes collected by the U.S. government,’ it said.”

Read more in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: In 2012, Apple paid $6 billion in U.S. federal income taxes, 1/40th of all corporate income taxes collected by the U.S. government.

The New York Times: How Apple sidesteps billions in global taxes – The New York Times, April 28, 2012

[Thanks to MacDailyNews readers too numerous to mention individually for the heads up.]