Apple Not Alone With Irish Tax Haven, Facebook Might Be Doing The Same

Apple has been under a lot of scrutiny lately over offshore profit shifting to Ireland. The tech giant apparently dodged $13.8 Billion (yes billion with a capital B) in taxes thanks to a tax shelter aka office in Ireland. Of course the company is vehemently denying these charges but they are going to have to prove it over the coming months.

I was recently looking-over some Facebook domain registration data when I noticed that Facebook seems to be registering domains and keeping them with their Irish entity, even though it would sure make a lot more sense to have these owned by their Silicon Valley-based HQ…unless of course they’ve figured out the same things that Apple did.

FacebookPoke.at and FacebookPoke.mobi are owned by Facebook Ireland even though neither of these domains is a .ie name, the local ccTLD for Ireland.

Facebook Ireland Ltd. has also been at the center of some pretty fishy Pay Pal charges that users have recently been complaining about as recently as May 17th. Now Facebook does seem to have a legitimate office in Ireland and is creating jobs there, which is a very good thing…but it sounds like Apple did too.

Moral of the story? Ireland might be a good place for a tax haven and Apple isn’t the only smart cookie to figure it out. That being said, if Apple gets in trouble Facebook could be next.

Note: I am a shareholder in Facebook but have no inside information about the company, any data used in this article was found in public records. At no point in this article am I saying or suggesting that Apple or Facebook are breaking the law.

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton