Microsoft owes $29 billion in back taxes plus penalties and interest to IRS::The IRS sent a surprise bill to Microsoft, hitting the company with a $28.9 billion bill for back taxes and penalties spanning a decade, starting in 2003.
Next week, Microsoft negotiates the pending tax figure to $0…
Week after that, Microsoft is raising Office plans by $5 per user per month across the board to cover their tax bills…
this is not very wholesome
Paying to use Microsoft office when OnlyOffice exists, lmao.
And if it’s a company paying for the user’s Microsoft office bs, then imo the point is mute.
Honestly, Microsoft can get bent. They aren’t going to negotiate to 0, these actions are being done after being long overdue, and it’s clear this administration is raising hell.
And the extra incentive here of $29B in tax dollars isn’t going to hurt either.
EDIT: LibreOffice is great if you live in a bubble world where Microsoft Office hasn’t dominated the business and school markets for 30 years. But here in the real world OnlyOffice and Google Docs are popular because they’re backwards compatible.
If LibreOffice ever wants to have a chance of overtaking OnlyOffice, Google Docs or Microsoft Office, they need to work on backwards compatibility with Doc and Docx. Also I don’t get the “payware” issue. They’re selling services. The Software is FOSS. It’s AGPL v3.
OnlyOffice? The fuck is that?
Looks
Repackaged open source payware trash.
LibreOffice works just fine without having yet another third party dev pilfering it to make it their bankroll. They’ve seemingly built an entire ecosystem with resellers and all trying to FUD themselves into a claim of being more compatible with MS doc formats than LibreOffice.
Support LibreOffice development instead.
Or…
Just pay for MS Office if you have document compatibility concerns.
OnlyOffice is amazing if you need compatibility with MS Office products. Not saying it’s perfect, and I have and use LibreOffice, but OnlyOffice is better fit than LibreOffice if your goal is to use MSOffice files in FOSS software. I don’t get to decide what files and software my school or work uses, and they use only MSOffice. If I hand my boss or coworker an ODS, they’ll have no clue what to do with it. LibreOffice doesn’t handle XLSX files nearly as cleanly as OnlyOffice.
If I make a table in LibreOffice, even using their open formats, I am giving up some nice features from OpenOffice.
There’s no way OO is just a cheap repackage of LO. They look very different and have different features.
OO even breaks .ods spreadsheets created in LO.
I’m not sure why you’re getting downvoted. OO is great for MSOffice files. I love LibreOffice, and it’s great for many things. It just can’t beat OO at MSOffice interoperability
6TB in Cloud Storage for 70$ a year, where else would I get that?
Self Hosting
2TB in Closet Storage for 64$ a year. Each new year subscription tier upgrades +2TB for free.
The IRS agent who worked up this case is either going to be up for a few days of extra vacation time or perhaps a job at Microsoft.
Corporations are not people, fuck them up.
Even if we treat then like people, they easily deserve that (and some criminal charges) for circumventing tax law.
If organizations are treated like people, they must be accountable to the law in a proportional way.
Dissolve them. That fucked country still has fucking death penalty.
Wow I wish I could not pay taxes for 3 decades and like do something nice with all that money…
Well, in fairness, they didn’t do anything nice with the money either.
Becoming a monopoly and tech giant is pretty nice…
Okay they aren’t good, but seriously what makes them a monopoly? I haven’t seen anyone make a good argument for this. There isn’t a single industry they’re in, that I know or can think of, that they hold enough market capture to be a monopoly.
Microsoft has lots of kickass stuff. Just Bing it, bro. Or jump on Teams with me and I’ll explain it while I rock out with my Zune.
/s obv
But they’re a giant corporation so that’s apparently fine.
To misquote J Paul Getty: “If you owe the IRS $29,000 that’s your problem. If you owe the IRS $29,000,000,000 that’s the IRS’s problem”
But no.
Alright, fine… You got me! It’s actually Microsoft’s problem.
XD
Clippy pops up on Excel. “Hey, it looks like you are trying to funnel revenue through a shell organisation in the Caribbean.”
That’s a pretty penny.
Yeah but they eared more than double that in profit in their 2023 year. This is taxes over a 20 year period.
In this context it does not seem like it’s too much.
It’s still way more than “none”. Let’s not let perfect be the enemy of good.
So where are all those fake democrats complaining that Biden’s funding the IRS is just going to have them go after small businesses and the lower/middle classes?
How’s that go? Gaslight, obstruct, project? lol
The IRS overwhelmingly go after poor people as they don’t have the means to defend themselves and end up settling out of desperation.
I’m sure after they get more money they’ll totally change though lol
Applejacks where you at buddy?
False dichotomy. They can go for a big, easy target as well as little peeps. Monitoring $600 transactions kind of shows they’re not just interested in big guys.
Right? It’s so silly that they think it’s an all or nothing process. Then again, it’s the internet lmfao.
How about we uphold that the law and taxes are for ALL people, not just rich or poor. We have graduated/progressive tax brackets for a reason. Everyone should be paying their fair share.
Great! Now do Apple!
With that money you could buy yourself a default search engine position at Apple.
Or 2 international space stations built today with modern tech
Or not quite half a Twitter (pre-Musk).
Space stations cost less than what some “send a short message” platform does… insanity.
I don’t know if today is do-able, best to give it at least till the end of the week.
With that much money, you could effectively end homelessness in the U.S. for a full year [1]
According to a rough estimate by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, it would cost $20 billion in 2012 dollars to afford every homeless person in the U.S. with one year of housing via vouchers. Independent groups have more recently recalculated this amount as ~$30 billion in 2023 dollars using similar methodologies. This is an estimated annual cost, but advocates argue that the program pays for itself – both in the sense that eliminating homelessness will reduce costs to other social programs & in the sense that many homeless will eventually return to self-sufficiency if given a fair opportunity. ↩︎
Imagine any other citizen doing the same. they would be rotting in prison.
I’d like to agree but it is not illegal to not pay your taxes. It is illegal to not file your taxes. So if you file your taxes and owe $5,000, you can’t go to jail/prison for not paying it.
If Microsoft pays that I’ll change my name to Microsoft.
Lemmy name or real name? I want to see this happen. Win win.
Both
Most of the major corporations in the US do not pay their fair share of taxes. Fuck the greedy pigs.
Next week’s news: Microsoft negotiates tax bill down to $3.50. You still need to pay out the ass for healthcare, peasants.
Five years from now it’ll be settled and Microsoft will pay ten billion.
