A PYMNTS Company

EU: Apple missed deadline to pay €13 billion in Irish back taxes

By  |  February 1, 2017

Last August, the European Commission closed a three-year investigation of Apple’s tax affairs with an order to the Irish government that it should recover about €13 billion in taxes that it believed Apple had underpaid over the last decade.

Ireland has missed the deadline for recovering the billions, but Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager, who gave the Irish government four months to collect the taxes, is proving very understanding about the delay.

“The recovering is not done yet but we have been working with the Irish authorities and we can see that they are moving forward to do the recovery of the unpaid taxes,” she said at a news conference in Dublin on Tuesday.

“It’s a tricky thing to do because it’s a large sum, so of course you have to figure out how to do that. It’s not an escrow account as in some of the other cases where it’s €25 million or €30 million or something like that,” she said. “I do respect that it’s a complicated matter and it may take a little more time than being within the deadline.”

Full Content: Patently Apple

Want more news? Subscribe to CPI’s free daily newsletter for more headlines and updates on antitrust developments around the world.