Corporation tax in the Republic of Ireland in the context of "Tax haven"

Corporate haven, corporate tax haven, or multinational tax haven is used to describe a jurisdiction that multinational corporations find attractive for establishing subsidiaries or incorporation of regional or main company headquarters, mostly due to favourable tax regimes (not just the headline tax rate), and/or favourable secrecy laws (such as the avoidance of regulations or disclosure of tax schemes), and/or favourable regulatory regimes (such as weak data-protection or employment laws).

Unlike traditional tax havens, modern corporate tax havens reject they have anything to do with near-zero effective tax rates, due to their need to encourage jurisdictions to enter into bilateral tax treaties that accept the haven's base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS) tools. CORPNET show each corporate tax haven is strongly connected with specific traditional tax havens (via additional BEPS tool "backdoors" like the double Irish, the Dutch sandwich, and single malt). Corporate tax havens promote themselves as "knowledge economies", and intellectual property (IP) as a "new economy" asset, rather than a tax management tool, which is encoded into their statute books as their primary BEPS tool. This perceived respectability encourages corporates to use these International Financial Centres (IFCs) as regional headquarters (i.e. Google, Apple, and Facebook use Ireland in EMEA over Luxembourg, and Singapore in APAC over Hong Kong/Taiwan).

Ireland has been labelled as a corporate tax haven in multiple financial reports, an allegation which the state has rejected in response. Ireland is on all academic tax haven lists, including the § Leaders in tax haven research, and tax NGOs. Ireland does not meet the 1998 OECD definition of a tax haven, but no OECD member, including Switzerland, ever met this definition; only Trinidad & Tobago met it in 2017. Similarly, no EU–28 country is amongst the 64 listed in the 2017 EU tax haven blacklist and greylist. In September 2016, Brazil became the first G20 country to "blacklist" Ireland as a tax haven.

Ireland's base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS) tools give some foreign corporates § Effective tax rates of 0% to 2.5% on global profits re-routed to Ireland via their tax treaty network. Ireland's aggregate § Effective tax rates for foreign corporates is 2.2–4.5%. Ireland's BEPS tools are the world's largest BEPS flows, exceed the entire Caribbean system, and artificially inflate the US–EU trade deficit. Ireland's tax-free QIAIF & L–QIAIF regimes, and Section 110 SPVs, enable foreign investors to avoid Irish taxes on Irish assets, and can be combined with Irish BEPS tools to create confidential routes out of the Irish corporate tax system. As these structures are OECD–whitelisted, Ireland's laws and regulations allow the use of data protection and data privacy provisions, and opt-outs from filing of public accounts, to obscure their effects. There is arguable evidence that Ireland acts as a § Captured state, fostering tax strategies.

Qualifying Investor Alternative Investment Fund or QIAIF is a Central Bank of Ireland regulatory classification established in 2013 for Ireland's five tax-free legal structures for holding assets. The Irish Collective Asset-management Vehicle or ICAV is the most popular of the five Irish QIAIF structures, it is the main tax-free structure for foreign investors holding Irish assets.

In 2018, the Central Bank of Ireland expanded the Loan Originating QIAIF or L–QIAIF regime which enables the five tax-free structures to be used for closed-end debt instruments. The L–QIAIF is Ireland's main debt–based BEPS tool as it overcomes the lack of confidentiality and tax secrecy of the Section 110 SPV. It is asserted that many assets in QIAIFs and LQIAIFs are Irish assets being shielded from Irish taxation. Irish QIAIFs and LQIAIFs can be integrated with Irish corporate base erosion and profit shifting ("BEPS") tax tools to create confidential routes out of the Irish tax system to Ireland's main Sink OFC, Luxembourg.

An Irish Section 110 special purpose vehicle (SPV) or section 110 company is an Irish tax resident company, which qualifies under Section 110 of the Irish Taxes Consolidation Act 1997 (TCA) for a special tax regime that enables the SPV to attain "tax neutrality": i.e. the SPV pays no Irish taxes, VAT, or duties.

Section 110 was created in 1997 to help International Financial Services Centre (IFSC) legal and accounting firms compete for the administration of global securitisation deals, and by 2017 was the largest structured finance vehicle in EU securitisation. Section 110 SPVs have made the IFSC the third largest global Shadow Banking OFC. While they pay no Irish tax, they contribute €100 million annually to the Irish economy in fees paid to IFSC legal and accounting firms.