OK I’m not a fan of Microsoft’s business practices in general but I’m becoming less of a fan of this whole desire to clamp down on so-called tax dodges. See it’s only in a time of economic downturn does the government start to consider legal business practices tax dodges. Let’s take Microsoft for instance.
Microsoft’s main headquarter is in Redmond, Washington. This is the location a majority of their development work is done. But development work isn’t their money maker, licensing their developed software is. Washington state charges a .484% software royalty tax, meanwhile Nevada charges no such tax. Microsoft, being a large business who knows how to handle tax codes, built their license center in Nevada. The license center is the arm of Microsoft that actually deals with licensing the software which is considered the sale.
This is how the United States works, if you don’t like one state you go to another. Washington knew they could generate revenue by establishing a software royalty tax since they had the worlds largest software company in their state. This means the state created an environment hostile to its largest company to make some more money. Microsoft realizing they are getting a bad deal moved their software sales department somewhere less hostile to their business.
Well some guy has decided that the way to fix Washington’s current budget problems is to charge Microsoft the software royalty tax anyways. These are the types of ideas that really piss me off honestly. The writer proclaims Microsoft is getting preferential treatment and is dodging taxes. I’ll be totally honest if I owned a business and after some time the state enacted a tax aim specifically to make money off of my company I’d have done the same thing as Microsoft. It’s probably not feasible to move the entire company due to having to move all the employees but if it were feasible I’d move the entire operation.
I’m not a fan of Microsoft, in fact they really don’t make any products beyond the XBox 360 that I like. But I get pissed off when somebody who doesn’t like a company decides that we should attack it via labeling them with some arbitrary title. In this case that title would be tax dodger, which as we know is becoming the boogeyman label given by our government.