The president of Microsoft has called for a global effort to modernise tax laws in the wake of the European Commission's ruling that Ireland collect €13 billion in tax from Apple.
Brad Smith was speaking to RTÉ News in Dublin as part of a visit to Ireland by senior Microsoft management, including the company's chief executive Satya Nadella.
Mr Smith said: "I think we need a global effort to modernise tax laws. In some ways it has to start in the United States because the US tax system is so out of date at this point."
However, he stressed Microsoft remained committed to Ireland, saying: "We have seen nothing in recent years that gives us any doubt about our future here in Ireland - it has been so central to our growth over 30 years."
Mr Smith, who is also Microsoft's Chief Legal Officer, welcomed the support from the Government here in the company's case against US government, which wanted to access emails stored in Ireland as part of an investigation.
Mr Smith said: "It was very important to us that we could store emails for people across Europe here in Ireland and assure them their privacy was protected.
"I think the involvement and support from the Irish Government was critical to our ability to make clear to the people across the United States that this in an important issue of principal and it matters across the Atlantic."
Microsoft won the case in the US courts in July.
The company currently employs 1,200 in Ireland but is in the process of buying professional network LinkedIn, which has 900 staff in Dublin.
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Mr Smith said it would be an opportunity for the employees of both companies to work together.
He added: "I would hope we would see that number grow as well. We look to the future with a lot of confidence about what we can do here."
Microsoft also announced it has more than doubled its European cloud computing investment in the last year.
Mr Natella said the tech company has invested over $3 billion (€2.67 billion) across Europe to date, and that Microsoft intends to deliver its cloud services from data centres in France from next year.
The company said it is continuing to invest in and expand its Ireland data centre hub.
Mircosoft also has a data centre hubs in the Netherlands, Austria and Finland.
The Microsoft Cloud, including Azure, Office 365 and Dynamics 365, includes 30 available, and 36 announced data centre regions.
