A trial opened Tuesday before a judge in San Francisco between Facebook and the United States tax authorities (IRS), who claims to the social network $ 9 billion in tax arrears. The litigation concerns a transfer of intellectual property carried out in 2010 by Facebook to one of its subsidiaries in Ireland. The tax authorities accuse the group of having declared, for the transferred technologies, a value lower than reality, in order to reduce the amount of tax to be paid in the United States on this income. Conversely, Facebook maintains that the sum paid to it by its Irish subsidiary in exchange for the technologies in question was actually greater than the real value of these assets, and that it was therefore too heavily taxed in the United States. United.
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Several senior Facebook officials are to be heard during the trial. The judgment could mark a precedent for the attitude of American justice towards the practice, common among multinationals, of transferring profits to the countries where they are the least taxed. "This lawsuit relates to transactions that took place in 2010, when Facebook had no revenue from mobile advertising, when its international activities were in its infancy and when its digital advertising products had not yet proven themselves" , commented a spokesman for the social network, Bertie Thomson, in an email to AFP. "We are anxious to present our arguments before the judge and to put an end to this litigation of several years," he added.
"Our business has experienced its ups and downs, but we are assuming the actions we carried out over ten years ago, at a time when our company was exposed to great risks and uncertainties," continued the spokesperson. .