profit shifting (or BEPS) tools, which facilitate avoiding taxes in all global jurisdictions in which the corporation operates. This is as long as the corporate tax haven has tax-treaties with the jurisdictions that accept "royalty payment" schemes (i.e. how the IP is charged out), as a deduction against tax. A crude indicator of a corporate tax haven is the amount of full bilateral tax treaties that it has signed. The U.K. is the leader with over 122, followed by the Netherlands with over 100. BEPS tools abuse intellectual property (or IP), GAAP accounting techniques, to create artificial internal intangible assets, which facilitate BEPS actions, via: IP is described as the "raw material" of tax planning. Modern corporate tax havens have IP-based BEPS tools, and are in all their bilateral tax-treaties. IP is a powerful tax management and BEPS tool, with almost no other equal, for four reasons: When corporate tax havens quote "effective rates of tax", they exclude large amounts of income not considered taxable due to the IP-based tools. Thus, in a self-fulfilling manner, their "effective" tax rates equal their "headline" tax rates. As discussed earlier (), Ireland claims an "effective" tax rate of circa 12.5%, while the IP-based BEPS tools used by Ireland's largest companies, mostly U.S. multinationals, are marketed with effective tax rates of <0-3%. These 0-3% rates have been verified in the EU Commission's investigation of Apple (see above), and other sources. Encoding IP–based BEPS tools The creation of IP-based BEPS tools requires advanced legal and tax structuring capabilities, as well as a regulatory regime willing to carefully encode the complex legislation into the jurisdiction's statute books (note that BEPS tools bring increased risks of tax abuse by the domestic tax base in corporate tax haven's own jurisdiction, see for an example). Modern corporate tax havens, therefore, tend to have large global legal and accounting professional service firms in-situ (many classical tax havens lack this) who work with the government to build the legislation. In this regard, havens are accused of being captured states by their professional services firms. The close relationship between Ireland's International Financial Services Centre professional service firms and the State in Ireland, is often described as the "green jersey agenda". The speed at which Ireland was able to replace its double Irish IP-based BEPS tool, is a noted example. It is considered that this type of legal and tax work is beyond