Facebook Inc is changing its tax structure so that it will pay taxes in the country where sales are made, rather than funneling everything through its Irish subsidiary.
The company said it would move to a “local selling structure” in countries where it has an office to support sales to local advertisers.
Menlo Park, California-based Facebook shifted its international business operations to Ireland in 2010.
Facebook has since come under pressure from the US and the EU for its tax practices.
Last year, the company said it would stop routing UK sales through Ireland after public outcry over news that Facebook paid only £4,327 (US$5,762 at the current exchange rate) in taxes in 2014.
In the US, the company is locked in a battle with the US Internal Revenue Service that might cost it more than US$5 billion, plus interest and penalties, related to global operations that are reported by the Irish unit.
“We believe that moving to a local selling structure will provide more transparency to governments and policymakers around the world who have called for greater visibility over the revenue associated with locally supported sales in their countries,” Facebook chief financial officer Dave Wehner wrote in a statement on Tuesday.
The European Commission is looking into ways to tax digital companies like Facebook as it seeks to raise money from an industry that the commission has said provides less tax than it should.
The commission has also ordered Apple Inc to pay about 13 billion euros (US$15.3 billion) in back taxes to Ireland, after it said the country granted unfair deals that reduced the tech giant’s corporate tax bill.
Facebook’s announcement is an “important change that is a step in the right direction,” the Italian treasury said in a statement.
Wehner said Facebook plans to implement the change through next year with a goal of switching all its offices to the new structure by the first half of 2019.
The company has more than 30 international offices.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day