“I don’t know how you got Apple to have so much of their business in Ireland,” Jerry Brown, governor of California, told an audience last week in San Francisco that included Enda Kenny, Irish taoiseach/prime minister. “We thought they were a California company but when you look at their tax return, they are really an Irish company. Anyway, that is part of the creativity — yeah, it’s called creative accounting. Anyway, I won’t go there.”
While Governor Brown delivered his barbed comments in a jocular manner, it wasn’t the welcome the Irish normally expect in California or in the rest of the United Sates.
This week the European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union (EU), opened an investigation into how Ireland helped Apple to cut its foreign income tax (termed corporate tax outside the United States) rate to low single digits in recent times.
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