In #Apple's War on Taxes, Surrender Costs $28 Billion | Wired Business
►http://www.wired.com/business/2013/01/apples-28-billion-dollar-tax-war
Dealing with the tax man, it turns out, could cost the company upward of $28.5 billion or send it on a shopping spree abroad.
(...) money it intends to keep perpetually out of the U.S. (...)
Apple’s big tax liabilities are important considerations when thinking about the company’s vaunted cash and securities hoard, which reached $121.3 billion three months ago. Fully $82.6 billion of that money was held by Apple’s foreign subsidiaries, which collect much of Apple’s profit as part of a popular tax avoidance scheme in which offshore subsidiaries hold a tech company’s intellectual property and the U.S. parent then licenses the intellectual property back. Thanks to such maneuvering, Apple paid just 1.9 percent on foreign earnings in its last fiscal year.