World Bulletin/News Desk

The international community needs to work together to stop large multinationals aggressively playing one country's tax code off against another, Ireland's Minister for Enterprise said on Wednesday.

"They play the tax codes one against the other, that is tax planning and I think we do need international cooperation through the OECD to deal with the aggressive nature of that," Richard Bruton told national broadcaster RTE.

Apple's annual reports show that over the past three years, Apple paid taxes worth 2 percent of its $74 billion in overseas income.

Apple said on Tuesday that the arrangements dated back over 30 years and had been negotiated with Ireland's government, which has long angered European economic peers such as France and Germany by helping multinationals to avoid paying tax on sales it makes to their citizens in their domestic markets.

Ireland said the low tax payment was not its fault and blamed other countries' tax legislation.