Accenture Consulting is an example of how big companies are shedding national identities and becoming unaccountable. Originally, Anderson Consulting, Acenture is now domiciled in Ireland (low tax), and has a series of loosely connected regional hubs, such as Prague and Dubai that also have low tax rates. To avoid residency problems for its 373,000 employees operating in 200 cities and 55 countries, it ensures that no one spends too much time at their project sites. Accenture is organised to be effectively stateless. It is paid to improve company efficiency (or tell feckless management what they dare not decide on its own), but could ‘t care less about communities and ordinary people.
ExxonMobil, Unilever, BlackRock, HSBC, DHL, Visa, all choose locations for personnel, factories, executive suites, or bank accounts based on where regulations are friendly, resources abundant, and connectivity seamless. Big corporations often have legal domicile in one country, corporate management in another, financial assets in a third, and administrative staff spread over several more. Large American firms — GE, IBM, Microsoft, to name a few — are collectively holding trillions of dollars tax-free offshore in companies incorporated in Switzerland, Luxembourg, the Cayman Islands.
Corporations are likely to overtake states in terms of clout, complete with their “stateless income”. Already, the cash that Apple has on hand exceeds the GDPs of two-thirds of the world’s countries. The 10 biggest banks still control almost 50 percent of assets under management worldwide. Meanwhile, the EU is pushing for a common tax-base policy among member states to prevent corporations from taking advantage of preferential rates. In which case firms would just look beyond the continent for metanational opportunities. Indeed, since social communities increasingly exist online, businesses and their operations might move entirely into the cloud and make nations effectively irrelevant. Already, the idea of taxing a multi-national corporation based on its headquarters’ location is painfully antiquated.
The world’s 25 biggest companies by sales
Walmart 486 bn (2015)
Exxon Mobil 269 bn
Shell 265 bn
Apple 234 bn
Glencore 221 bn (2014)
Samsung 163 bn (2015)
Amazon 107 bn
Microsoft 94 bn
Nestle 93 bn (2014)
Alphabet 75 bn (2015)
Uber 62 bn
Huawei Tech 60 bn
Vodaphone 60 bn
Anheuser- Busch 47 bn (2014)
Maersk 40 bn (2015)
Goldman Sachs 34 bn
Halliburton 33 bn (2014)
Accenture 31 bn (2015)
McDonalds 25 bn
Emirates Airlines 24 bn
Facebook 18 bn
Alibaba 12 bn
Blackrock 11 bn (2014)
McKinsey 8 bn
Twitter 2 bn (2015)