Firms should be taxed like people, Apple co-founder

The co-founder of US technology giant Apple which used its Irish subsidiaries to lower its tax bill has said big corporations should be treated the same as the "little guy".

Steve Wozniak, who set up Apple with $300 apiece from him and friend Steve Jobs, was in Derry today for a business conference and said it was fair to tax large firms like individuals.

“People are not taxed on profit, they are taxed on income, corporations should be taxed the same as people in my mind, that is how it should be, that would make things fair and right,” he said.

“That means corporations pay taxes on all of their revenues or people only pay it on a tiny amount called profit and until we rectify that the whole problem is just with us forever.

“That is why the rich get richer and the poor get poorer and I am always for the individual being much more important than their training, same reason I created the Apple computer at the start, it was to empower the little guy.”

The technology giant has been accused of avoiding tens of billions of dollars in US taxes by sheltering profits in its three Irish subsidiaries.

At a senate hearing in Washington last week, executives admitted the company paid a top tax rate of 2 per cent on $74 billion of sales outside North America over the past three years, largely through its use of tax structures in Ireland.

Taoiseach Enda Kenny has brushed off criticism of Ireland’s tax regime — insisting he was backing plans for global tax transparency and an end to tax havens.

Mr Wozniak added: “For a corporation there is no such thing as personal ethics, you will do anything, any scheme you can to maximise your profits, so they are just obeying the system, the big companies are all obeying the system of taxation, they are all doing the same things and you can say the system is bad to allow these things that people do not consider ethical.

“That is difficult too and takes the load off the companies but why is the system that way? The system is that way because those with the power and the money, large corporations particularly, make sure that politicians can create the things that will enhance the corporations.“

He asked why businessmen were able to write off expenses against income but many others were not. “Why do businessmen get to write off lunches and cars? If normal people did they would have more savings,” he added. “I thought, that is really not fair, that businesses are not treated the same as people, this goes a lot deeper.

“They are treated by the law as people, treated by the taxes as people, treated by other situations, social entities as people, but with taxes a corporation only pays a tax on profits.

“A person would say, ‘my life is my business and I have to pay for my home, pay for my clothes, my food and what is left over if I make a little money some year and put it in savings, that is my profit’, but people are not taxed on profit, they are taxed on income.”

He said simply because Mr Jobs was not around did not mean Apple would go away, pointing out that he left once before yet innovative ideas like Knowledge Navigator (new touch and voice interaction introduced in 1987) were still created.

Mr Wozniak said after a while the company began turning over machines every six months with faster processors but had lost a little excitement and flavour.

“We got that excitement and flavour in the iPhone 5, look how beautiful it is, the design, the beauty, the ascetics, yet the iPhone 5 has sort of been a failure right now, it seems like the expectations of ourselves in the smartphone and tablet field is about half of what we had expected, that is what it has dropped to,” he added.

“People want change, we expect change, that is what is so exciting in the world, I have got something new to show off, to talk about, to see and it didn’t exist before and when your life stays the same as it did before it doesn’t matter after a while how beautiful the product is necessarily.”

He said anybody would recognise Apple was number one in the world even though it was not number one in unit sales, but rather perceived as being the leader and showing the way, and people would like to see more of that again.

“You cannot come out with a new hot product like the iPod or the iPhone, you cannot come out with another huge winner every year,” he said.

“It is just like you can go into periods where it is slow until a new basic technology, those things I call atoms, a new development like touch screens that are affordable, comes along and all of a sudden you can make a new product that didn’t exist but you are not totally in control of that just by having the right people there.”

PA