Doublethink

Further to yesterday's Death & Taxes post, it seems we can add doublethink to the corporate world's reality-distorting armoury of chicanery and deception, particularly when it comes to taxation. To quote Orwell's definition from his "1984":

To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself—that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word—doublethink—involved the use of doublethink.

In Friday’s i there was a piece which demonstrated to a 't' the alternate reality that corporates seem to inhabit and which sets them apart from the rest of us mere mortals. Fittingly, it concerned Microsoft, a company adrift on an ocean of profit, and one that seems to take taxation, shall we say, somewhat lightly as an obligation: more of an itch that occasionally needs to be scratched.

Microsoft's Round Island One subsidiary, registered in Dublin made a profit in it's accounting year 2019-20 of $314.7bn, some two-thirds of the Republics GDP; paying precisely zero corporation tax on it. Reasons given for this by Microsoft are that it has no employees, save for its directors and is tax-registered in Bermuda and therefore not liable. Quoting directly from Microsofts response as to the probity of the arrangements, the i reports:

"Microsoft has been operating and investing in Ireland for over thirty-five years and is a long-time taxpayer, employer and contributor to the economy..." Really, given the above? This kind of doublethink has unfortunately become the norm at this level. Any smaller organisation or individual who acted and thought in such a polarised manner would be deemed either mendacious or mad.