Microsoft owes $29 billion in back taxes plus penalties and interest to IRS

L4sBot@lemmy.worldmod to Technology@lemmy.world – 723 points – Microsoft owes $29 billion in back taxes plus penalties and interest to IRS
appleinsider.com

Microsoft owes $29 billion in back taxes plus penalties and interest to IRS::The IRS sent a surprise bill to Microsoft, hitting the company with a $28.9 billion bill for back taxes and penalties spanning a decade, starting in 2003.

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The IRS agent who worked up this case is either going to be up for a few days of extra vacation time or perhaps a job at Microsoft.

Corporations are not people, fuck them up.

Even if we treat then like people, they easily deserve that (and some criminal charges) for circumventing tax law.

If organizations are treated like people, they must be accountable to the law in a proportional way.

Dissolve them. That fucked country still has fucking death penalty.

Next week, Microsoft negotiates the pending tax figure to $0...

Week after that, Microsoft is raising Office plans by $5 per user per month across the board to cover their tax bills...

Paying to use Microsoft office when OnlyOffice exists, lmao.

And if it's a company paying for the user's Microsoft office bs, then imo the point is mute.

Honestly, Microsoft can get bent. They aren't going to negotiate to 0, these actions are being done after being long overdue, and it's clear this administration is raising hell.

And the extra incentive here of $29B in tax dollars isn't going to hurt either.

OnlyOffice? The fuck is that?

Looks

Repackaged open source payware trash.

LibreOffice works just fine without having yet another third party dev pilfering it to make it their bankroll. They've seemingly built an entire ecosystem with resellers and all trying to FUD themselves into a claim of being more compatible with MS doc formats than LibreOffice.

Support LibreOffice development instead.

https://www.libreoffice.org/

Or...

Just pay for MS Office if you have document compatibility concerns.

OnlyOffice is amazing if you need compatibility with MS Office products. Not saying it's perfect, and I have and use LibreOffice, but OnlyOffice is better fit than LibreOffice if your goal is to use MSOffice files in FOSS software. I don't get to decide what files and software my school or work uses, and they use only MSOffice. If I hand my boss or coworker an ODS, they'll have no clue what to do with it. LibreOffice doesn't handle XLSX files nearly as cleanly as OnlyOffice.

If I make a table in LibreOffice, even using their open formats, I am giving up some nice features from OpenOffice.

There's no way OO is just a cheap repackage of LO. They look very different and have different features.

OO even breaks .ods spreadsheets created in LO.

I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted. OO is great for MSOffice files. I love LibreOffice, and it's great for many things. It just can't beat OO at MSOffice interoperability

6TB in Cloud Storage for 70$ a year, where else would I get that?

2TB in Closet Storage for 64$ a year. Each new year subscription tier upgrades +2TB for free.

Wow I wish I could not pay taxes for 3 decades and like do something nice with all that money…

Well, in fairness, they didn't do anything nice with the money either.

Becoming a monopoly and tech giant is pretty nice..

Okay they aren't good, but seriously what makes them a monopoly? I haven't seen anyone make a good argument for this. There isn't a single industry they're in, that I know or can think of, that they hold enough market capture to be a monopoly.

Microsoft has lots of kickass stuff. Just Bing it, bro. Or jump on Teams with me and I'll explain it while I rock out with my Zune.

/s obv

So where are all those fake democrats complaining that Biden's funding the IRS is just going to have them go after small businesses and the lower/middle classes?

How's that go? Gaslight, obstruct, project? lol

The IRS overwhelmingly go after poor people as they don’t have the means to defend themselves and end up settling out of desperation.

I’m sure after they get more money they’ll totally change though lol

Applejacks where you at buddy?

False dichotomy. They can go for a big, easy target as well as little peeps. Monitoring $600 transactions kind of shows they're not just interested in big guys.

Right? It's so silly that they think it's an all or nothing process. Then again, it's the internet lmfao.

How about we uphold that the law and taxes are for ALL people, not just rich or poor. We have graduated/progressive tax brackets for a reason. Everyone should be paying their fair share.

But they're a giant corporation so that's apparently fine.

To misquote J Paul Getty: "If you owe the IRS $29,000 that's your problem. If you owe the IRS $29,000,000,000 that's the IRS's problem"

That's a pretty penny.

Yeah but they eared more than double that in profit in their 2023 year. This is taxes over a 20 year period.

In this context it does not seem like it’s too much.

It's still way more than "none". Let's not let perfect be the enemy of good.

I didn't believe you so I looked it up. You're wrong. Their gross profit is over 4x that amount in 2023.

I got my number from the article that was posted.

Clippy pops up on Excel. “Hey, it looks like you are trying to funnel revenue through a shell organisation in the Caribbean.”

Next week's news: Microsoft negotiates tax bill down to $3.50. You still need to pay out the ass for healthcare, peasants.

Imagine any other citizen doing the same. they would be rotting in prison.

I'd like to agree but it is not illegal to not pay your taxes. It is illegal to not file your taxes. So if you file your taxes and owe $5,000, you can't go to jail/prison for not paying it.

With that money you could buy yourself a default search engine position at Apple.

Or 2 international space stations built today with modern tech

Or not quite half a Twitter (pre-Musk).

Space stations cost less than what some "send a short message" platform does... insanity.

I don't know if today is do-able, best to give it at least till the end of the week.

With that much money, you could effectively end homelessness in the U.S. for a full year [^1]

[^1]: According to a rough estimate by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, it would cost $20 billion in 2012 dollars to afford every homeless person in the U.S. with one year of housing via vouchers. Independent groups have more recently recalculated this amount as ~$30 billion in 2023 dollars using similar methodologies. This is an estimated annual cost, but advocates argue that the program pays for itself -- both in the sense that eliminating homelessness will reduce costs to other social programs & in the sense that many homeless will eventually return to self-sufficiency if given a fair opportunity.

Most of the major corporations in the US do not pay their fair share of taxes. Fuck the greedy pigs.

IRS commin' in tellin' me "Ain't you boys goin' gimme some back taxes?"

I told them they'd be lucky if they got some front taxes.

Can't imagine running business is difficult when you don't pay taxes.

The issues that generated this debt pertains to intercompany transfer pricing.

Can someone explain what this means in english?

Edit: I looked into it more and it seems the IRS objects to how Microsoft attributed cost and revenue between its international entities. I’ve heard of this practice being used to arbitrarily shift tax burden internationally. For example, let’s say a US company builds Widgets that cost $20 to make and sells them for $50. By normal accounting, that would result in a net of $30 taxable in the US. But if the company spins up a subsidiary in Ireland to hold its Widget production patents, they can charge the US branch $30 per unit in patent royalties. This results in net $0 taxable in the US and $30 taxable in Ireland. One limitation is that the money has to stay in Ireland. But if the company is already a multi-national one, there’s a good chance they have legitimate business expenses in Europe that the money could be later spent on. The end result is that talent and work from American workers, and revenue largely coming from American buyers, is being manipulated to avoid paying taxes back into the American economy, just because the business has international interests and there are many tax havens overseas.

A company as big as Microsoft is not just one company. Just like movie studioes will famously make their film "lose money" to avoid royalty payments, I would bet Microsoft is trying to avoid taxes by selling services, products or profits "at a loss" between different corporate LLCs all owned by Microsoft.

Imagine if your time spent grocery shopping was an "import" corporation that overcharged your "works for a salary" corporation, all within your household.

But I'm sure someone can read the SEC filing and understand for sure.

29 billion? That's it? It is so tiny!

I hope they pay up and we just send that to Ukraine as aid.

Yea but the us military depends on them continuing to support xp just for them soooooo, why should they pay? They could literally cripple the world

At this point, the military should just switch to Linux!

Problem is, there's a lot of really specialized, critical software, that is provided by vendors and throws an absolute fit with any change. You could maybe run Windows in a VM, but it may not work with the specialized hardware and networking gear being used, and now you're spending a bunch of extra time and money setting up a vm if windows inside Linux, which means you also have to train everyone on how to use the VM, adds another management/security issue, and adds another point of failure.

If they ever switch (the entire govt should, it would be so awesome to see the govt resources put into Linux development instead of M$ pockets) it'd have to be a very gradual process, and windows would still be around decades from now for legacy systems. (If the US hasn't imploded in civil war or the planet melted by then 🫠)

I mean, the military literally has the guns. Microsoft will support them or it will be nationalized and then support them.

Not exactly a position Microsoft has much actual leverage in.

Would love to see the military force MS to contribute to WINE development until all govt apps work on Linux.

I think its more likely that the dept in Microsoft and all auxiliary depts that maintain the military's systems would be forcibly drafted and any resources they need seized enmass and with no regard for what is destroyed in the process.

Fort lewis is near Microsoft headquaters, and they have lots of big flying things, boom boom shooty things, and even more boots on ground.

I doubt it would help Linux much, but it would be an interesting day in Redmond for sure.

Well, they can put Linux requirement to goverment contracts right now.

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