This Country Won the Global Tax Game, and Is Swimming in Money

Countries like Saudi Arabia, Norway and Chile have long used sovereign-wealth funds to sock away windfall profits from periods of high prices for commodity exports like oil and metals for future years when their own production winds down or international prices plunge..

Ireland on Tuesday created its own rainy-day fund thanks to outsize profits from an unusual and controversial source of income: U.S. technology and pharmaceutical giants seeking to lower their tax bills..

In the past eight years, the country of five million has watched its corporate tax income triple to the tune of 22.6 billion euros last year, equivalent to almost $24 billiongiving it a budget surplus last year of a comfortable 8 billion euros when many governments are suffering from a postpandemic debt hangover..

Irelands government, unable to predict how much income it will make from corporate taxes year to year or how long the surge will continue for, said a new Future Ireland Fund could amass 100 billion by the middle of the next decade..

In a recent paper, Navodhya Samarakoon, a doctoral student at the University of Michigan who previously worked on international tax affairs for the Treasury Department, estimates that U.S. businesses funneled $1.2 to $1.4 trillion in profits to low-tax jurisdictions via a complicated international loophole from 1998 to 2018..

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