After receiving an inaugural award from the Irish state agency responsible for attracting foreign companies earlier today, Apple CEO Tim Cook said that the global corporate tax system needs to be overhauled as he backed the changes to global rules that are currently under consideration (via Reuters).
“I think logically everybody knows it needs to be rehauled, I would certainly be the last person to say that the current system or the past system was the perfect system. I’m hopeful and optimistic that they (the OECD) will find something,” Cook said.
“It’s very complex to know how to tax a multinational… We desperately want it to be fair,” the Apple CEO added.
Apple’s growth in recent years has prompted the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to pursue global reforms over where multinational firms should be taxed.
The reforms being examined are based around the booking of profits by multinational firms in low-tax countries such as Ireland where they have bases, rather than where most of their customers are.
Apple is one of Ireland’s largest multinational employers with 6,000 workers and both it and the Irish government have gone to court to fight a European Union order that Apple must pay nearly $14.5 billion in back taxes to Dublin.
