Moving licensing rights to SpongeBob from one country to another is just a matter of paperwork. “If you take money or other property like licensing rights and move them from one subsidiary to another subsidiary, have you done anything that changes the group as a whole economically? You still have the dollar.”ViacomCBS’s tax arrangements, which appear to be legal, take advantage of disparate tax codes across nations, the study said. Since 2002, tax experts working for Viacom, CBS and ViacomCBS have devised structures to take advantage of these mismatches, thus lowering taxable income, according to the study. In other words, for every dollar Viacom collected overseas for a blockbuster like “Transformers” (after converting from reals, lira or renminbi), less than a penny was likely subject to corporate income tax, according to the study.

Source: New York Times June 01, 2021 16:28 UTC