Most of the tax of the American company Apple is due in the United States, not Ireland, Pascal Saint-Amans of the OECD said in Dublin on Monday 26 September.
At the end of August, the European Commission ordered Ireland to recover around €13 billion in unpaid taxes from the company, arguing that this was illegal state aid. Dublin takes the view that it is the responsibility of the United States to tax the profits concerned and will appeal against the decision before the CJEU.
When approached by the Irish press, Saint-Amans declined to comment directly on the Commission's decision. He explained that under the OECD's transfer pricing rules, "most of the tax from US technology multinationals should be due in the United States", rather than Ireland or any other European country. He reiterated that this decision does not set a precedent. "My understanding is that the EU decision is based on a certain form of legalistic state-aid reasoning (…). It is not a transfer pricing case", he added. "What is extremely important is that these rules, these standards, be implemented consistently by everybody and that the state-aid cases do not undermine the standard, in particular, on transfer pricing cases", he concluded, as quoted by Reuters.
At an event arranged in Brussels by Politico on Tuesday 27 September, European Commissioner for Taxation Pierre Moscovici said that the United States should "also play the game" by implementing the OECD's BEPS action plan to fight aggressive corporate tax evasion. A number of doubts have already been raised, in particular by various European delegations, as to the willingness of the United States to implement the plan. Most of the BEPS standards are recommendations and best practice, and the EU is still one of the only ones to have adopted various BEPS actions as minimum standards. (Original version in French by Élodie Lamer)