International taxes

Apple Inc. won its court fight over a record 13 billion-euro ($14.9 billion) Irish tax bill in a crushing blow to European Union Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager’s crackdown on preferential fiscal deals for companies.

The European Union may delay digital tax proposals to give countries move time to hammer out a deal and avert a transatlantic trade war, a top official from the bloc said.

A group of five national tax authorities has been working together for the past two years on cooperating in the fight against tax crimes, with one man pleading guilty last week in Germany to fraud charges involving cryptocurrency.

France held firm on its plans to resume collection of a national digital tax that hits technology giants including Amazon.com Inc., Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Facebook Inc., saying it wouldn’t be swayed by threats of U.S. sanctions.

The Internal Revenue Service has released final regulations on deductions for two of the international tax regimes introduced under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017: foreign-derived intangible income (FDII) and global intangible low-taxed income (GILTI) for U.S.-based multinational corporations.

New data shows the extent to which multinational companies shift profits around the globe to avoid tax, increasing pressure on international efforts to rewrite rules for a digital era, the OECD said.

Apple Inc. will find out next week whether it won the first round of its bid to topple a record 13 billion-euro ($14.7 billion) Irish tax bill imposed by European Union state-aid regulators.

But they remain attractive to countries looking to countries looking to tax U.S. tech giants and to U.S. states hungry for revenue.

Italy and Spain also offered to limit the scope of a proposed global digital tax, a concession after the U.S. threatened to hit countries with tariffs if they moved ahead with levies on tech companies.

The extension also applies to Americans living abroad who would otherwise generally have had a filing deadline of June 15.