Tax avoidance

The U.S. lost a bid to help Apple Inc.’s court fight against the European Union’s order to pay Ireland a record 13 billion euros ($15.3 billion) in unpaid taxes.

A key figure disappeared from Apple Inc.’s latest quarterly report. It’s also gone from the regulatory filings of Netflix Inc., Microsoft Corp., Google’s Alphabet Inc. and Oracle Corp.

The iPhone maker will start transferring billions of euros to Ireland within months, after reaching a deal on an account to hold the cash while it fights a European tax case.

Vague disclosures by public companies about how much they’re paying in taxes don’t appear to be deterring investors, according to a new study.

The Internal Revenue Service provided additional information Tuesday to help corporate taxpayers deal with the new section 965 transition tax for repatriating foreign profits under the tax law that Congress passed in December.

The Internal Revenue Service said Tuesday it plans to close the 2014 Offshore Voluntary Disclosure Program on Sept. 28, 2018 and will start winding it down before that date.

Alphabet Inc.’s Google moved 15.9 billion euros ($19.2 billion) to a Bermuda shell company in 2016, saving at least $3.7 billion in taxes that year, regulatory filings in the Netherlands show.

Ikea is the latest company ensnared in the European Union’s sprawling tax probes as regulators look at whether the retailer’s revenue deals in the Netherlands allowed it to avoid hundreds of millions of euros of taxes.

Amazon.com Inc. will pay 100 million euros ($118 million) to the Italian tax authorities for the period of 2011-2015 in a settlement that closes the fiscal probe by the country’s tax police, Italy’s Revenue Agency said in an emailed statement Friday.

In Vanuatu, a remote archipelago in the South Pacific, a popular tourist attraction is something called land diving. Villagers on the lush outer island of Pentecost jump headfirst from a tall wooden tower with tree vines tied to their ankles to break their fall. For the divers, the rite of passage is a plunge into the unknown—and that’s not a bad metaphor for where this secretive tax haven is headed these days.