Sort of.
The IT services company, under pressure to meet a high earnings forecast, has turned to the ever-malleable tax code for a boost to its earnings. That has some pretty surprising consequences, as Alex Barinka and Jesse Drucker report for Bloomberg: The company is driving more income through a subsidiary in the Netherlands. In 2008, the subsidiary, IBM $IBM International Group BV, reported just three employees, but at the end of 2012, it reported 205,000—almost half of the company’s worldwide staff of 430,000 workers.
Join 500,000+ readers who start their day with Quartz.
By subscribing, you agree to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.
Of course, we’d be hearing about a Dutch property bubble if those 205,000 people actually lived in the Netherlands. In fact, just 2% of them do. The rest are scattered around the world. For tax purposes, measures like these saved the company $6.5 billion from 2010 to 2012. In 2013, the company paid a 15.6% overall global tax rate, which it attributed to a “more favorable [than] expected geographic mix” of revenues (auditor jokes are funny). That will have added to the $44 billion of untaxed cash the company had accumulated overseas by the end of 2012, though we don’t yet know by how much.
Public-policy concerns aside, what worries analysts, of course, is a company on a cost-cutting mission running out of costs to cut. When it’s doing so much of that through tax avoidance, it inevitably raises questions about how well the primary business is going.
