VSThis is the kind of letter with a tricolor letterhead that you don’t want to find in your mailbox. Especially if it is addressed by the tax services. Microsoft received a rather harsh one from the formidable US federal tax service, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). The latter sends him a tax adjustment of nearly 29 billion dollars (27.3 billion euros).
A record, commensurate with a company whose turnover still exceeds 200 billion and profit, 70 billion. The IRS accuses the company of having recorded, between 2004 and 2013, very significant profits in particularly lenient tax areas, such as Ireland or Puerto Rico.
Don’t panic at Microsoft headquarters. The group’s vice-president of taxation, Daniel Goff, indicated that the group was appealing this decision and that, in the absence of an agreement with the IRS, it would not hesitate to embark on a long procedure of several years in court. He also specifies that the group has paid nearly $67 billion in the United States since 2004. Since 2012, Microsoft has reformed its tax accounting rules. In its latest annual report, dated June 2023, the firm also indicates that its overall tax rate is 19%. The majority is settled in the United States, where the company generates about half of its turnover and profits.
Dematerialization
It must be said that large digital multinationals have made enormous use of the dematerialization of their products to avoid taxes around the world, recording significant sales in countries where they did not physically exist and therefore paid no tax. Apple and Google know something about this, having argued with Brussels on the subject.
The pressure has increased with the colossal work carried out by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development for more than ten years to reach agreement between nearly 140 countries on the taxation of the digital activities of multinationals. The project presented on Wednesday October 11 provides that, in the case of a margin greater than 10%, part of the profits should be reallocated to the countries in which turnover has been achieved, in proportion to the latter. A revolution which does not win everyone’s consent and which America itself is struggling to support. The acceptability of paying tax is an essential and eternal battle.