Bloomberg News’ awful reporting on Apple’s U.S. corporate taxes

“There really does seem to be a great deal of misunderstanding going on over the story about Apple’s taxes,” Tim Worstall writes for Forbes. “As an example, the number of people seeming to claim that Apple moved profits out of the US is very large. Especially when we consider that the one thing Apple didn’t do was move profits out of the US: it simply didn’t bring foreign profits into the US. This is not the same thing for the obvious reason that leaving a country and entering a country are different things.”

Worstall writes, “Then there’s what Bloomberg has said today: ‘Here’s another way to take advantage of transparency’s positive effects: Require companies to disclose what they actually pay in federal income taxes. As the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations reported last week, Apple’s 2011 annual report states that its tax liability on $34.2 billion in revenue came to $8.2 billion, for an effective tax rate of 24.2 percent. That calculation, however, includes U.S., state and foreign taxes. In fact, Apple paid only $2.5 billion in federal income taxes, for a 20.1 percent effective rate.'”

“This is all really rather odd,” Worstall writes, “For a start, of course the company is going to state its total tax liability. That’s what it has to do: state its total tax liability.”

Much more in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: Misunderstanding or disinformation?

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Tagged: Apple, Apple taxes, Bloomberg News, Peter Oppenheimer, tax avoidance, taxes, Tim Cook, U.S. corporate taxes, U.S. taxes