About half of all the foreign profits of US multinationals are booked in tax havens with Ireland topping the charts as the favorite, according to a new economic study on Monday. And the benefits for the increase in profits have gone to shareholders, the paper showed.
US companies are by far the biggest users of tax havens, where they face effective tax rates of just seven percent, according to the study by economists Thomas Wright and Gabriel Zucman.
"Ireland solidifies its position as the #1 tax haven," Zucman said on Twitter. "US firms book more profits in Ireland than in China, Japan, Germany, France & Mexico combined. Irish tax rate: 5.7%."
The research was made possible by the US tax cut in December 2017 that contained a mandatory repatriation of profits, which allowed researchers to calculate the final tax bill for the companies. Because the 2017 law "allows these firms to repatriate their foreign earnings at a low rate...we now know that US multinationals have really had a high after-tax profitability on their foreign operations over the last decades."