Meta is fighting an almost $16 billion tax bill

For years, Big Tech’s offshore-tax fights have been argument-by-spreadsheet. What was a bundle of trademarks, licenses, and customer agreements “worth” when it got shipped to a low-tax address and blessed by a forecast? The IRS is now trying to replace the forecast with a report card — and Meta $META +1.93% is the first company getting called to the principal’s office.

The New York Times reports that the agency is opening “a new front” by “using real-world profit data to challenge how big companies value offshore intellectual property.”

Related Content

George Washington University sold a campus to Amazon for $427 million. It’s becoming a data center

OpenAI, Anthropic, and the fog of AI war

The Meta–IRS dispute traces back to 2010, when Facebook built a structure that helped route profits out of Ireland and toward zero-tax jurisdictions — the era’s famous Double Irish. When Meta moved rights offshore, its Irish unit agreed to pay the U.S. parent about $6 billion, a price meant to match what those overseas markets were expected to produce from tech developed in the U.S.

But the IRS is pointing to what it says actually happened instead of what the spreadsheets promised.

Auditors say Meta failed to report roughly $54 billion in income and owes nearly $16 billion in back taxes and penalties. Meta sued in U.S. Tax Court in December, looking to stop the agency’s approach. Last May, a Tax Court judge largely sided with Meta, finding that, yes, the company undervalued the rights, but by far less than the IRS. wanted. Now, Meta is basically saying that this is a second bite at a transaction already fought over — invoking collateral estoppel, the legal version of “sorry, you don’t get a do-over.”

An IRS Chief Counsel memo issued in early 2025 argues that the “commensurate with income” standard can be applied through “periodic adjustments” that rely on income actually earned after a transfer. If that logic holds, it gives the agency a new lever against multinationals whose offshore IP valuations were built on projections and protected by their complex natures. Tax consultant Stephen Curtis has estimated that there’s nearly $700 billion in potential exposure across a handful of companies that he says are severely undervalued offshore transfers.

The IRS has been sitting on tools it hasn’t used much. In the final days of the Biden administration, the tax agency issued a memorandum telling auditors to start running analyses that look at what profits actually showed up, not just what companies projected years earlier. Auditors are beginning to raise that argument more often.

Now, the agency is trying to mount a precedent-setting case while operating with a workforce that has shrunk by more than a quarter — an awkward moment to pick a $16 billion knife fight with one of the richest companies on Earth.

Meta’s lawyers are trying to keep this fight boxed into what the company could plausibly predict in 2010. The IRS wants the years since to count. And if the government gets its way, every multinational that treated offshore IP as a one-and-done valuation exercise is going to start sleeping a little lighter.

📬 Sign up for the Daily Brief

Our free, fast and fun briefing on the global economy, delivered every weekday morning.

Sign me up