July 23, 2011

From a Washington Post article on Microsoft’s quarterly earnings announcement:

Net income in the fiscal period that ended in June rose 30 percent to $5.87 billion, or 69 cents a share, from $4.52 billion, or 51 cents, a year earlier, Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft said in a statement today. That beat the 58-cent estimate of analysts surveyed by Bloomberg.

Yesterday, Microsoft announced it had made net income of $5.87 billion in the latest quarter, but had reduced its tax rate from 25% a year ago to 7%. Annualized, that would be about $4 billion incremental in tax avoidance just over the last year. You’re probably saying to yourself, “Hey, I’d like to reduce my tax rate by 72% from 2010 to 2011, too! What are some tips from Microsoft on how I could do this?”
In the fine print of Microsoft’s July 21, 2011 press release, you can find:

Our effective tax rates for the fourth quarters of fiscal years 2011 and 2010 were approximately 7% and 25%, respectively. Our effective tax rate was lower than the U.S. federal statutory rate primarily due to a higher mix of earnings taxed at lower rates in foreign jurisdictions resulting from producing and distributing our products and services through our foreign regional operations centers in Ireland, Singapore and Puerto Rico, which are subject to lower income tax rates.

Microsoft’s tax avoidance strategy wasn’t public knowledge until recently. New Is My Business reported on June 7, 2011:

Software giant Microsoft has reportedly been using three jurisdictions where it operates outside the United States - Puerto Rico, Ireland and Singapore - as tax shelters to reduce its federal tax bill, the Financial Times reported.

The strategy is part of Microsoft tax planning methods, details of which the Washington-based company reluctantly disclosed to the Securities and Exchange Commission in its quarterly report filed last month. That was when the company revealed for the first time that most of the $50.2 billion in cash it has amassed is held in so-called “low-tax regional centers.”

If you are wondering why giant American corporations aren’t reinvesting their giant retained earnings in creating American jobs, or at least distributing them to American shareholders as dividends or stock buybacks, well, one reason is because they’ve declared that they just happened to make most of this cash in certain overseas tax havens. Hence, 84% of Microsoft’s $50 billion trove of cash is officially overseas, and can’t be repatriated without paying American taxes on it which means that American shareholders can’t get it and thus can’t pay taxes on their capital gains, either. This kind of tax policy would make sense to Rumplestiltskin, Hetty Green, Silas Marner, and Scrooge McDuck, but it doesn’t seem to make much sense to me.

For purposes of tax avoidance, Puerto Rico is considered, by the U.S. government, to be an untouchable foreign tax haven, because it’s crucial, as Admiral Mahan explained in the 19th Century, for the U.S. Navy to hold Puerto Rico to protect the approaches to the future Panama Canal from the Kaiser’s High Seas Fleet and the new dreadnoughts of the Royal Navy. Or something. The U.S. doesn’t actually have any military bases in P.R. these days, nor does it have the Panama Canal, but it still has lots of tax breaks for Puerto Rico.