I'm not defending Apple with this one. But a lot of the arguments here seem to suggest if everyone paid their share it'd be golden. As though being in the private sector makes you ruthless, dishonest, and that tenacity increases with revenue... The public sector is no different. People are greedy when given the opportunity.
People are tribal by nature, a pack. We do incredibly well in small communities. That doesn't scale. We wind up factional even on a nation-wide level let alone international.
You give a bunch of money to Govt in the form of tax. You watch a collective close to Govt get rich. We accept clandestine operations in Govt. We're actively cultured toward accepting, endorsing, and enforcing it. Unrivaled transparency is required for any public sector style system to work. Not the wishy-washy transparency we occasionally see today - categorized expenditure crap.
There's 0 way to verify the authenticity of tax revenue declarations. You'd need to know what people paid in tax to verify that with what the Govt claims it receives in tax. But we're cagey about people knowing how much we earn. "It's rude to ask, it's rude to tell, and it's a violation of my privacy." (For reference, I'm a big advocate of privacy). That mindset benefits employers, hinders employees, and disintegrates the basis of a verified Government.
There's little stopping any kind of manipulated expenditure. Not much stopping batshit insane public-to-private sector deals occurring. You can't pull all supply-chains for public sector work into the public sector, that's rapidly looking like a planned economy with it's own issues, and still doesn't address the fact that you're condensing power and pushing revenue toward an organization that won't be even vaguely clear about what it's doing with it.
Public-to-private sector contracting also suffers from the single contract issue. You contract to a single organization. There's 0 competition. It's monopolized that gargantuan consumer, and it now has 0 incentive to offer anything competitive.
It's bizarre that we form opinions about one collective (corporate leaders) and assume an almost identical collective must operate in an altogether opposite and altruistic way. Ideally we'd have systems to ensure this. But national security or inefficiency and DO YOU KNOW HOW MUCH IT'D COST TO DO THAT!? all wade in heavy. Hiding behind red-tape when it works for them is willful obfuscation. Calling it only red tape when it's either proposed for the good of transparency or when called out on bullshit, otherwise it's just good ol' SOP.