$967 billion of intangible assets have been held in Ireland by multinational corporations as part of sophisticated tax avoidance schemes.

That’s according to a Business Post investigation, who described this as a “tax mirage”.

Senior Business Post reporter Killian Woods told The Anton Savage Show that this mirage could soon vanish before our eyes.

“Why this is important is the concentration of that near trillion dollars of intellectual property in Ireland – nearly the vast majority of it - is controlled by US companies,” he said.

“As we know in the last few months, there’s been a lot of threats from the Trump administration about getting that intellectual property back into the US.

“Through a series of measures, they plan on making companies, or really, imploring companies, to move it back into the US.”

Corporation tax

Mr Woods said that this host of intellectual properties (IPs) are generating significant amounts of corporation tax.

“The IRS (Internal Revenue Service) over in the US, they’re investigating Coca-Cola and Microsoft at the moment for some of this tax planning,” he said.

“A lot of this is legal tax planning processes, but they’re still investigating them for the amount of tax they’re paying abroad and if they’re not paying enough tax abroad on these amounts.

“So, these companies, they’ve had the American authorities on them for years and they’re fighting it very, very rigorously in the courts.

“This is not necessarily a new trend, but it would be a very easy win for the Trump administration to get this move back in the stroke of a pen.”

According to Mr Woods, now that we are bound to OECD rules to raise corporation tax, we are somewhat at the whim of how the US administration decides to treat this.

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