Coca-Cola Taxes
Coca-Cola Taxes
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With a wink and a nudge, transactions are often structured to shift profits from high-tax countries to low-tax countries to cut their tax bills. The most popular target for transfer pricing abuse is intangible property, including licenses for manufacturing, distribution, sale, marketing, and promotion of products in overseas markets. Since intangible property doesn't really have a physical home—unlike, say, real estate—it's easy to transfer it to countries that offer certain benefits, including more favorable tax treatment. (That’s what’s in dispute in the Coca-Cola case.)
Ugh
The intangible property for coke is a secret recipe that is preserved in some vault in the US. There's no transfer of IP here and that's not what's in dispute.
The facts are centred around the profitability of concentrate producers that earn the super profits. Operating entities and the US makes a slim margin.
You can read a better informed analysis here.
The dispute centres on Coke subsidiaries in Ireland, Brazil, Eswatini and four other countries that manufacture concentrate, the syrup that gets mixed with carbonated water to make drinks such as Coca-Cola, Fanta and Sprite. The subsidiaries sit between the US parent company, which owns the brands, and the bottling companies that make the final product.
The company routinely shifted production of concentrate to countries with favourable tax rates, the US tax court found. The subsidiary in Ireland, which had a tax rate as low as 1.4 per cent, at one point shipped to bottlers in 90 countries.
Unlike independent contract manufacturers, which typically have low margins, an IRS analysis found these Coke subsidiaries were unusually profitable — earning a return on assets two-and-a-half times that of the US parent company that owns the iconic brands. By controlling how much the subsidiaries must pay other parts of the Coke network for use of the brands and marketing, and by setting the prices they can charge bottlers, Coke itself in effect decided their profitability, the court heard.
Those profit levels were “astronomical”, Judge Albert Lauber wrote in an initial ruling in 2020.
The company routinely shifted production of concentrate to countries with favourable tax rates
Manufacturing is different than IP transfers.
the US parent company that owns the iconic brands. By controlling how much the subsidiaries must pay other parts of the Coke network for use of the brands and marketing, and by setting the prices they can charge bottlers, Coke itself in effect decided their profitability, the court heard
IP is owned by the US. What they're describing is transfer pricing. Subsidiaries are owned by coke hence by definition coke sets the prices under which the US charges for their IP. It's tax advantageous to charge a low amount to shift profits to low tax jurisdictions.
Numbers look massive but overall not large enough. Coke is gigantic and the dispute spans multiple years. The IRS hasn't always covered themselves in glory and they may still fumble a technical aspect on the burden of proof.
Interesting to see it unfold but coke has a history of environmental, business and humane malpractices. This is just another outcome of such business model.