Twitter Hopes To Reduce Its Tax Bill (In 140 Characters Or Less)? READ.

Twitter can sum up its new tax reduction strategy in 140 characters or less: Double Irish and Dutch Sandwich.
(Yes, that leaves 110 characters to spare).

The internet is aflutter with the news that Twitter is jumping on the Irish corporate tax bandwagon a la Apple AAPL +0.87%.
The online social networking site – which more or less introduced the world to the idea of “microblogging” – has filed for an initial public offering (IPO). The company will go public on the NYSE in November. It is slated to be the biggest social media IPO since Facebook FB +3.85% – and er, we remember how that went (which might also explain why Twitter opted for NYSE over NASDAQ).
The IPO is expected to make millionaires out of its shareholders, despite the fact that Twitter isn’t actually pulling in revenue in 2013. It has, in fact, never made an actual profit. But like Facebook, Twitter is huge: as of September 2013, the company could boast 200 million users sending over 400 million tweets daily.
Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, Biz Stone and Noah Glass and is headquartered in San Francisco. San Francisco may have lovely weather, amazing restaurants and a hipster vibe – but that’s not enough to sustain a company. San Francisco has two things working against it as a corporate headquarters: the U.S. corporate tax system and the California tax system. In fact, California was recently cited as nearly the worst state in the country in which to do business: only New York and New Jersey are worse, according to the Tax Foundation’s 2014 edition of the State Business Tax Climate Index.
Companies that focus on making things – like cars and furniture – can find it difficult to pull up roots and move for tax reasons. But Twitter, like tech-oriented Microsoft and Apple before it, plans to capitalize on the fact that most of its value is centered on intellectual property. It’s much more difficult to pinpoint a home for intellectual property, making it a great asset to situs in a tax favored countries while shuttering profits between one or more countries.
Here’s how the most talked about of these kind of arrangements (popularized by Apple) tax works.
Or, in other words, here’s how to build a “Double Irish and Dutch Sandwich”:

• The U.S. requires all domestic corporations (except those exempt under section 501) to file an income tax return whether or not they have taxable income.Tax rates can be as high as 35% – one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world – depending on the level of income: