Financial Transparency Coalition

WASHINGTON, DC – Global Financial Integrity (GFI) praised G20 leaders today for prominently focusing on the issue of illicit financial flows, committing to move toward the automatic exchange of tax information, and renewing the mandate of the Anti-Corruption Working Group for another two years, but expressed disappointment in the leaders’ failure to address the issue of anonymous shell companies.

Tech companies have been racing to acquire as many patents as possible for the better part of the last few years. Last month, Microsoft announced that it had reached a monster deal with AOL, buying 925 patents from Facebook for $1 billion, and then quickly reaching a deal to share the patents with Facebook for a cool $550 million. Many, many more examples of all the top tech companies - Yahoo, Apple, Google, Motorola, RIM - buying and selling huge numbers of patents have proliferated. Many of these patents are frivolous. For example, Apple patented 'smartphone multitasking' and 'swipe...

WASHIGNTON, DC – A front-page article in Sunday’s edition of The New York Times drew attention to shady accounting techniques utilized by Apple Inc, the technology giant, to avoid paying billions of dollars in taxes each year. However, Global Financial Integrity (GFI) notes that Apple’s tax dodging is only one example of a larger problem: most multinational enterprises abuse tax haven secrecy. Tax haven abuses are estimated to cost the Internal Revenue Service US$100 billion per year and developing economies roughly US$1 trillion annually.

On Sunday, The New York Times ran a massive, 3700-word, story on their investigation into aggressive, but legal, tax avoidance at Apple. Apple uses a wide network of subsidiaries in tax havens to shift profits away from high-tax jurisdictions like the United States. Apple has previously been a noted innovator in the tax strategy department, pioneering techniques to drastically reduce their tax bill. Despite explosive growth in Apple's profits, their tax bill has barely budged in recent years.