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a3camero | 5 years ago

“Transfer pricing” is why this doesn’t work out.

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croon|5 years ago

Could you elaborate? Reading up on it it's not clear what you mean.

a3camero|5 years ago

Companies buy a combination of goods and IP (patents and trademarks). The goods come from a developed country and the IP is licensed from a tax haven. The goods are sold at near cost with the markup being in the IP. The result is a supply of goods between countries that causes a significant diversion of the revenue to the tax haven. This is used by most big companies in tech, pharma, etc. The government can’t challenge these schemes because there is no open market for IP (because they’re monopoly rights) so there’s no way to argue that the price paid wasn’t the open market price.