40 
A parliamentary committee is to investigate the high-profile tax cases of Starbucks, Google and Amazon, with execs from the massive companies to face questions over their suspiciously low UK tax bills.
The Public Accounts Committee has asked bosses from several tech firms to attend a hearing into their tax affairs, which have hit headlines recently after dodgy deals to lower UK taxes involving past losses and overseas affiliates have been exposed.
Labour’s shadow culture minister Helen Goodman claims companies like Twitter and Facebook are placing an extra burden on police and social workers, who have to deal with cases of online grief, only to see the tech giants dodge their responsibility when it comes to paying their taxes that could/should fund our support workers. [Reuters]
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Oh great, another parliamentary committee made up of MPs who are more interested in getting their fat, sweaty faces on television than actually discussing the issues at hand.
It’s also rather rich that house-flipping, rent-swapping, expense-fidding MPs are going to be the ones to criticise others about their financial affairs.
Always the cynic, Helen Goodman only claimed £519.31 for a cottage in her constituency booked for 1 adult & three children, a £42.18 hotel bill from March 2005 even though she wasn’t elected until May 2005, £10,071 for stamp duty and £707.47 for surveyor when buying property in her constituency & £1,456 a month mortgage interest payments, £686 for furniture, £341.05 for carpets, £180.50 for china, £350 for desk, £1,210.73 for curtains, £696 for sofas, £202.50 for roller blinds and £243.60 for glass and china.
Yeah Doctor!! How dare you critize these gods, their untouchable
*they’re
Super Pedant Man, AWAAAAYYYYYYYY!
amazon, avoidance, facebook, giz uk, google, tax, uk
giz uk ? are you not paying your tax?
I don’t know about the tax arrangements of giz uk specifically, but I know Gawker Media use the same off-shore avoidance techniques in the US that they attacked Mitt Romney for.
When asked to clarify them they came back with the wonderful quote of ‘Well, we’re not running for president, are we?’.
No, you’re not, but you still have a responsibility to society.
I heard Kat & Jimmy Carr use the same accountant
I need that accountants number
about time – apple / microsoft / google / amazon / ebay / starbucks just to name a few, should be contributing to schools, medical, universities, social care etc.
They already do contribute, they sell them their equipment & services.
So not only are they not paying tax, they’re making us all pay more to buy their shit, a big double f*** you to all the middle and lower classes who pay the correct amount, aren’t we lucky
Cases of Online Grief? Really?
because the binders are full of women
And once again, I say that they need to “grill” the people that made these tax loopholes, and close them – there’s no need to have a go at the said companies – if it’s legal, they’ll do it if it saves them a few hundred million quid!
indeed. unfortunately the blue chips can afford way better tax accountants than the government will ever get.
On a more serious point you question these companies for their actions, avoiding tax don’t you think its the goverments fault for making it so easy. If you were told theres a way to avoid the tax rate on your salary with little to no work or cost would you? I think 70% of us would. Thats why there are benefit thiefs etc
It is both their faults – just because something is possible and legal doesn’t mean you should do it, and likewise, a govt shouldn’t criticise companies for ensuring they maximise their bottom-line by totally legal actions.
The benefit example isn’t entirely accurate though as that is actually theft and against the law, the actions of these companies isn’t.
It’s the difference between Tax Mitigation/Avoidance vs Tax Evasion. One is good business, the other results in a jail sentence..
see my answer above!
It’a about time they actually investigated them.
However as many people have said if they are only going through legal loopholes then it’s not so bad. At the end of the day business is about making money, the more they save in taxes the more they can expand and the more people they can employ which all comes back to the government in PAY NIC etc etc.
Any company (much like any person) who works their ass off will do whatever they can to try and save as much money as possible where legal. If they are seriously paying ridiculously low amounts of tax (as Barclays were paying like 2% of corporation tax or something crazy last year!) the the government NEED to fix these loopholes so they don’t have to cut public services so much.
But will it happen… well see!
ive just seen a pig in a helicopter
You have to admire some of the skill and cut throat attitudes of the accountants here. Paying the Swiss branch of your company a royalty for using your own logo, then claiming a loss in this region.
Genius – just maybe a bit morally ambiguous.
not even morally ambiguous. its bollocks. morally bankrupt more like.
Anyone here ever actively tried to pay MORE tax than the minimum they’re supposed to?
Didn’t think so.
Yeah but I haven’t got billions to spare at the moment
The quantity is irrelevant.
I like the way you say quantity is irrelevant but you would probably be the first to argue that these companies pay x millions more than the average person on the street. Quantity is always relevant to everything and anything !
If someones only got £200 and they bought you a christmas present worth £150 and another persons got 1 million and they only spend a thousand on you, the person who’s spent £150 cares about you more because they’re giving up more for you, they have to struggle on with £50 and the person with 1m has to struggle on with £999,999.
Joe Bloggs has 25K pays 20% in tax leaves him with 20K to pay the bills, where as a big company has 1 billion pays 5% in tax leaves them £950 million to roll around in. do you see the parallels in fairness and how much the person with less gives to society. or are you the sort of person who would go all dewy eyed over the person who bought you the 1K present and not appreciate how much the other person has given up for you ?
The point is not how much it’s do they pay the correct amount, the legal amount.
If they do and you want them to pay more then you need to look to the laws but pear in mind it WON’T come off their profits when they do pay more. They’ll up their prices or lay off workers and it’ll come out of your pocket, that pocket that you already think is hard hit.
It’s also worth noting that the big company is made up of people who are paying taxes on their earnings and share dividends which isn’t included, the government gets the tax in the end it’s just how many moves it makes in between.
My point going back to your original post and my reply is people with less money who try to avoid paying the full amount of tax are significantly less greedy than these huge companies with billions to spare and would still have billions to spare if they payed the correct corporation tax.
And to say the government still gets the same amount of tax because their often poorly payed employees pay tax only compounds my point, as for lay offs that too just compounds my point further, that these companies are being greedy at the expense of everyone else. aside from the fact you only pay corporation tax on profit (like any other tax) so that profit obviously isn’t steadily making its way to society via the employees is it, otherwise it wouldn’t be a profit, and I don’t see why people with pensions invested in those shares should pick up the bill, while the key share holders stuff huge dividends into yet another tax dodge.
You seem to have missed the bit where nobody’s talking about tax evasion or not paying the full amount of tax, these companies are doing that. We’re talking about paying more tax than the amount required after all accounting and I’m saying no matter how much money everyone tries to pay the minimum required (except cheats but that’s a different issue), nobody here volunteers to give the tax man extra every year out of the goodness of their heart.
You’ve also missed WHY the government still gets the tax but I’m sure it would take too long to try to explain and the bit about profit, if you take an extra 10% of their profit (or whatever number) then they’ll simply increase their profits to compensate, that means less dividends (so tax lost there), perhaps less pay for employees, or perhaps a rise in the cost of products so we pay more. In the end it ALWAYS comes out of our pockets.
Because WE are all there is.
you originally posted
“Anyone here ever actively tried to pay MORE tax than the minimum they’re supposed to?
Didn’t think so.”
to which I replied
“Yeah but I haven’t got billions to spare at the moment”
Your point is nobody likes paying Tax so we shouldn’t criticise these big companies
My point is yes we should because they’ve got a lot more money than most people and therefore dont feel the effects of paying the correct amount of Tax that the rest of us do, where some people are struggling to put food on the table to feed their kids these c***s are wining over having to get rid of one of their super yachts.
Disclaimer Im not overtly liberal or socialist, borderline communist who thinks everyone with money is evil and should sacrifice 10 years of their life to build up a business only to be slapped round the face and taxed 60% 70% 80% 90% I just think everyone should pay the correct and fair amount of tax, with no excuses or diverting attention towards populist figures of hate like the government, or leaping through holes in the system and they should realise how lucky they are in COMPARISON to most people.
The key word was MORE. The minimum being the correct amount. If they weren’t paying the correct amount they would be being investigared by the TAX man NOT parliament.
People can get tax breaks for all kinds of things, washing uniforms, travel expenses, lunch for mobile workers etc… You dont see many people refusing to claim (If they know about it) because they want to give more money to the tax man out of the goodness of their hearts.
Your totally missing my point again about selfishness, greed and some people being able to comfortably pay the correct amount and still be left with wods of cash, but aside from that the CORRECT and FULL amount of corporation tax they SHOULD pay is 26% Ebay payed less than 0.7% and as their profit margins clearly show, they didn’t do that by claiming expenses. They did it by handing over the fees groped from UK sellers to a little company in the tax haven of Luxembourg called paypal instead of processing the fees locally like they should, you know like a tax dodge.
I’m not missing your point, It’s just not really relevant to the fact that they like everyone else pay the MINIMUM legal amount they can, they have enough that they can afford to pay people who’s job it is to work that out whereas most people have to do it for themselves. The corporations not greedy, it’s not anything, it’s job is simply to make as much profit as possible within the law inorder to please its shareholders, which it’s done. Again, this is not an investigation by the Inland revenue service into have they done anything illegal, it’s one by parliament because the MP’s dont like the laws they set up to govern it. I could comfortably pay tax including the extra that covers a couple of tax breaks I get, but I’m allowed to claim for them so I do, the sums are a pittance compared to these companies but thats not really the point. (also how can a company which has no self, be selfish?).
Of course they’re selfish A company is owned by individuals some individuals get a larger slice of the profit than other individuals, these individuals run the company and instruct the accountants and lawyers to find loop holes through which to push the cash so they dont have to pay for the upkeep of the countries infrastructure, which their company uses to run its business, to a far greater degree than any single tax payer. When they instructed their accountants to take these measures they weren’t thinking of all the little old ladies with a small amount of shares they have via they’re pensions.
Legalities got nothing to do with it, these are loop holes ambiguities in the written law they weren’t the intention of the tax system and these companies Know it, which is immoral they are not paying their fair share and they are stuffing cash in their pockets when other people who arguably work harder for a living are struggling to get by. just because someone didn’t write the laws to cover every loophole it doesn’t suddenly make it Moral.
Morality is simply the laws of opposites, moral is balance and immoral is imbalance, so to take your original argument someone who earns 10 million a year who pays a accountant to negate paying 97% of their tax bill, so they can buy another super yacht vs someone who earns 25k a year and scrapes together expenses to knock off 2%, so they can put food on the table, can you not see the imbalance or is logic, balance and morality not your thing ?
Logic is my thing, balance not so much and there’s no morality in taxation whatever the government would have you believe. They set the levels and change them at whim, if it was a matter of morality it would be set in stone.
If the company’s on the stock market then it’s very rare that the individuals that own it run it, the individuals that run it do so for the owners, they instruct the accountants to find the most cost effective ways possible to run things so that that company makes money and if that’s paying tax in Switzerland at their rate instead of tax in the UK at ours then that’s what they’ll do, for the benefit of the owners and the company. Besides which in the situation of eBay it all takes place on the Internet anyway.
I find it extremely ironic that you say there is no morality in taxation yet your original post is in effect “let he who is without sin cast the first stone” a moralistic statement if ever there was one. but I don’t think Jesus was thinking along the lines of, if you’ve stollen a few toffees in your time you can’t criticise people who steal millions. or if you’ve ever called someone a name, you can’t criticise or bring to justice murderers. there’s that scale and balance thing again a basic tenant of logic !
It’s more “quit whinging when you’d do the same” than “he without sin”. Just because you don’t have the opportunity doesn’t change things,