&gt; Don&#x27;t you have to transfer the IP at something approaching fair market value to the tax haven corporation?<p>So here&#x27;s the deal.  &quot;Transfer pricing&quot; is a thing, and it&#x27;s what you&#x27;re supposedly allowed to sell stuff at.  <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Transfer_pricing" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Transfer_pricing</a><p>So if you sell something on the open market anywhere, you can&#x27;t sell it to your foreign subsidiary or owner for too much more or less than the open market price.  But things get dicey when you&#x27;re talking IP: patents and trademarks don&#x27;t trade on the open market but are absolutely vital for a subsidiary to be alive, right?  Amazon isn&#x27;t Amazon if it can&#x27;t call itself &quot;Amazon&quot;.<p>The other trick is to offer some kind of service that&#x27;s difficult to precisely quantify like having an accounting or service center in one country that every foreign subsidiary is required to pay for.  It might not be a reasonable price but the cost of auditing all the call center records to find out it&#x27;s costing $3&#x2F;minute (on average) for a particular US based company to outsource its support calls to somewhere instead of $0.10&#x2F;minute is going to be very steep.  Do this across a few different lines of corporate support and your profit hiding is accomplished.