The Intellectual Property Holding Company Tax Use and Abuse from Victoria's Secret to Apple Cambridge Intellectual Property and Information Law Series

Many companies that have become household names have avoided billions in taxes by 'parking' their valuable intellectual property (IP) assets in holding companies located in tax-favored jurisdictions. In the United States, for example, many domestic companies have moved their IP to tax-favored states such as Delaware or Nevada, while multinational companies have done the same by setting up foreign subsidiaries in Ireland, Singapore, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. In this illuminating work, tax scholar Jeffrey A. Maine teams up with IP expert Xuan-Thao Nguyen to explain how the use of these IP holding companies has become economically unjustified and socially unacceptable, and how numerous calls for change have been made. This book should be read by anyone interested in how corporations - including Gore-Tex, Victoria's Secret, Sherwin-Williams, Toys-R-Us, Apple, Microsoft, and Uber - have avoided tax liability with IP holding companies and how different constituencies are working to stop them.

1. Introduction; 2. The Delaware gift to corporations; 3. The domestic IP holding company's structure and phantom; 4. The scrutiny from the States; 5. Domestic tax haven; 6. Key incentives to created foreign intellectual property holding companies; 7. International structures used by Apple and other multinational companies; 8. Government barriers to intellectual property income shifting and their (in)effectiveness; 9. Foreign tax havens: exploring solutions to intellectual property income shifting offshore; 10. Final thoughts on IP holding companies and corporate social responsibility.

Jeffrey A. Maine is Maine Law Foundation Professor of Law at the University of Maine School of Law. An expert on tax law, he has published seven books and numerous articles in the field. Professor Maine focuses his current research on the intersection of taxation and intellectual property, and has co-authored with Xuan-Thao Nguyen a treatise and a law school textbook on the tax treatment of intellectual property. Formerly a practicing attorney at Holland and Knight, Professor Maine has more than twenty years of experience in teaching, including positions at six law schools.
Xuan-Thao Nguyen is the Gerald L. Bepko Chair in Law and Director of the Center for Intellectual Property and Innovation at the Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law. She is a senior consultant for the World Bank Group IFC. She won the prestigious 2016 Grant Gilmore Award from the American College of Commercial Finance Lawyers for her publications on the intersection of intellectual property and commercial laws. She has published ten books and more than thirty law review articles on intellectual property, taxation of intellectual property, and commercial law. Her works are cited by the Federal Circuit, the Third Circuit, the Ninth Circuit, federal district courts, and state tax courts.