How a slick accounting maneuver led to a $29 billion tax bill for Microsoft

L4sBot@lemmy.worldmod to Technology@lemmy.world – 275 points – How a slick accounting maneuver led to a $29 billion tax bill for Microsoft
finance.yahoo.com

How a slick accounting maneuver led to a $29 billion tax bill for Microsoft::In the largest tax audit in U.S. history, the IRS rejected Microsoft’s efforts to assign profits to a small factory in Puerto Rico.

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For scale:

Amid this dynamic environment, we delivered record results in fiscal year 2022: We reported $198 billion in revenue and $83 billion in operating income. And the Microsoft Cloud surpassed $100 billion in annualized revenue for the first time.

We should still celebrate this. For decades the IRS has been committed to the mere appearance of tax enforcement. This signifies a significant investment in corporate enforcement and hopefully has a deterrent effect.

Case in point, in this situation Microsoft originally got the IRS’ approval for this tax scheme. Only after a change in leadership and strategy did the IRS investigate. Next time we at least have hope the IRS won’t approve these schemes in the first place. It’s not perfect but it’s progress.

this just makes all the enshittification even worse: many of these shitty tech companies could make the numbers higher simply by calculating them properly

But we are just a tiny indie company and we can't keep those thousand of employees so we're gonna have to lay them off.

Unrelated, we just bought this neat little new trinket, we got a bargain at $68.7 billion dollars. We couldn't have paid it at full price mind you. We are a small little indie company living paycheck to paycheck.