Thread by @DawsonSField

Huge victory for the IRS over Coca Cola in case of off shoring IP ownership & transferring profit out of the US to the divisions owning the intellectual property to avoid US taxes on the profits. Coke now owes $3.4B in taxes for Coke!
#ButNothingsHappening
news.bloombergtax.com/daily-tax-repo…

This is a common tax avoidance scheme, internally the company awards the intellectual property rights to a foreign division of the company. Then the US divisions pay royalties or profit shares to that foreign division, lowering their profits in the US.
It is a very common scheme.

Just as important, the IRS got a ruling that a Coca Cola friendly agreement with the IRS in 1996 covering prior years, does not bind the IRS to accepting the accounting formulas for every years since 1996. They avoided $3.4B in taxes they avoided by using that scheme...

These games are played with a variety of methods, and once they slip one by regulators or the IRS, they tend to latch onto them & stretch them as far as they can until IRS jumps back in.

In this specific case, Coca Cola was choosing to not charge full royalties to overseas division of the company. Allowing the profits to stay overseas to avoid being taxed if they were paid back into the US portion of the company.

The court found the IRS was correct that Coca Cola should have been charging it's subsidiary bottlers what it would charge an unaffiliated company for use of their formulas & trademarks. But it under charged them to keep profits off shore...

This is a big deal because EVERY multinational corporation in the world engages in these internal accounting schemes to avoid paying taxes on their profits. Usually earning the profits in the lowest tax locations & even laundering it between divisions using tax loopholes.