14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft is one of the companies that have often been accused of turning to tax avoidance schemes to boost profits and Redmond has now come under investigation in Luxembourg for its tax practices.
The European Commission is said to be looking into Microsoft’s tax affairs, but the company can’t be accused on anything so far, as the process is only supposed to gather information about the way the state of Luxembourg handles the process of tax collection from multinational firms.
A spokesman of the European Commission mentions in a statement that this is nothing unusual, so Microsoft has nothing to be afraid of, as they are only trying to collect information regarding the way taxes are handled by several states that are member of the European Union.
“As we have said publicly many times before, the commission continues to gather information about certain tax practices in several member states, in order to assess the situation from the point of view of EU state aid rules,” the spokesperson is quoted as saying.
“However we will not make any comment on whether specific companies may or may not be covered by this information-gathering exercise.”
As far as any potential investigation that could start following this process, the spokesman says that it’s too early to talk about such a thing, revealing that ongoing investigations are already happening in Ireland and the Netherlands involving Apple and Starbucks.
“It is in any event entirely premature to speculate on whether new investigations could target this or that specific company in the future. At the moment we have three ongoing investigations, which relate to tax rulings concerning Apple in Ireland, Starbucks in the Netherlands and Fiat Finance and Trade in Luxembourg,” the spokesperson adds.
This isn’t the first time when Microsoft’s tax affairs are brought in the spotlight and the same thing happened in the United States in late 2013, when a US senator proposed a bill to block any potential tax dodging scheme that might be used by the software giant and other tech companies.
Microsoft obviously reacted very fast, saying that it’s already paying millions in taxes and employing several thousands only in the United States, which makes it one of the biggest contributors in the country.
“Through our employment, compensation, and purchases of U.S. goods and services, Microsoft's operations supported roughly 462,000 U.S. jobs. In Washington State specifically, Microsoft has been the single largest contributor to economic growth since 1990; our impact on the state accounted for 32.4 percent of the total gain in state employment,” Microsoft said in a statement.
Microsoft is yet to release a statement in this new Luxembourg case, so we’ll update the article accordinglu when we receive one.