Last time I talked a lot about zero taxation in the context of tax avoidance and evasion. What I didn’t get round to dealing with was a recent EU Court of Justice decision about zero taxed Dutch investment funds (C-448/15). Now the Netherlands has come in for a lot of bad tax press in recent times, but in this case no one was saying it had done anything it shouldn’t have done. And tax avoidance and evasion were also not an issue. The Netherlands gives these investment vehicles special tax treatment for sound economic reasons, namely to provide a neutral tax basis for the collective investment of capital: by taxing the fund’s profits at a zero rate if they are distributed to its investors, th
Zero has been in the tax press rather a lot recently. Often it’s about companies paying zero tax on (a lot) more than zero profits. US intolerance The latest variation on this theme is a report from the US based Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy that has researched the Federal taxes paid on US profits by 258 Fortune 500 companies. There are many impressive statistics quoted in the report such as one which says that 100 of the surveyed companies paid zero federal taxes in at least one of the years covered (2008-2015). The report suggests this was not a result of losses suffered by any of the companies (well, not in the years in question, at least). That may be so, but, to (mis)quote
