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What about when your government becomes worst than, say, Saudi Arabia?
Facebook paid £4,327 corporation tax in the UK in 2014
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Re: Facebook paid £4,327 corporation tax in the UK in 2014
#52No-one expects companies to pay the full whack of tax. But Facebook is taking the piss. They need to be a bit careful, because they risk causing much tighter tax regulation in EU. Citizens don't see this behaviour and think "well done, got one over on the government". Most citizens are infuriated by this scumbag behaviour. And before anyone says "they're just obeying the law" -- we don't know that. They're clearly no…
> They need to be a bit careful, because they risk causing much tighter tax regulation in EU. Don't think they've got much to worry about as long as Juncker's in charge of the commission at least. There will be huffing and puffing, but no blowing the house down.
Some background: Jean-Claude Juncker, the current President of the European Commission has served as the prime minister and financial minister of Luxembourg. During his regime, they effectively turned Luxembourg into a tax haven for international corporations, allowing them to transfer "license fees" of trademarks, copyrights and other immaterial rights with effectively a flat fee (ie. no taxes paid, just a one time not-a-bribe fee paid to the tax authorities of Luxembourg).
The primary export product of Luxembourg is banking and financial services. They also have some steel production and industry, but effectively without their shenanigans on tax evasion, the country would be bankrupt.
A lot of this has recently come into daylight in the LuxLeaks [0] scandal.
Re: Facebook paid £4,327 corporation tax in the UK in 2014
#53Global companies offshoring profits and not paying enough tax (in the eyes of many countries) was a hot topic at the last G20 summit in Brisbane. This isn't limited to Facebook, as the article explains. The issue and background here is that when large companies operate globally, each country has its own local subsidiary, owned by the global entity. Money is made in each country by selling goods or services. How are t…
> Global companies offshoring profits and not paying enough tax (in the eyes of many countries) Also in the eyes of many citizens of those countries, not just the government trying to make the budget fit.
Yes, agreed, which makes it much more likely that laws will get passed to collect this tax as it will probably have strong political and voter base support.
Re: Facebook paid £4,327 corporation tax in the UK in 2014
#54No-one expects companies to pay the full whack of tax. But Facebook is taking the piss. They need to be a bit careful, because they risk causing much tighter tax regulation in EU. Citizens don't see this behaviour and think "well done, got one over on the government". Most citizens are infuriated by this scumbag behaviour. And before anyone says "they're just obeying the law" -- we don't know that. They're clearly no…
> No-one expects companies to pay the full whack of tax.
I do.
Re: Facebook paid £4,327 corporation tax in the UK in 2014
#55The UK press seems to have a field day when it comes to multi-national corporations not paying corporation tax. We will no doubt shortly have a number of MPs telling us how unacceptable this is and that Facebook need to start paying up. This all irks me a little. 362 Facebook staff on an average salary of say £65,000 will contribute at least £7,230,696.60 in taxes and NI to HMRC. Let's also not pretend that £65,000 i…
> relocating to somewhere like Dublin
Afaik Facebook is still overwhelmingly based in Dublin, employing three times as many as in the UK. They likely hire in the UK the bare minimum they really need. So yeah, they've already "relocated" really.
This is the same for pretty much any European corporation, btw. Anyone who could leave for cheaper shores, did so in the '00s. What is left are the essential crews strictly necessary to the job of tapping one of the richest consumer markets on the planet.
The "employment threat" is basically toothless nowadays anyway, because "new economy" numbers are ridiculous in the great scheme of things -- 350 jobs won't change much of anything.
Re: Facebook paid £4,327 corporation tax in the UK in 2014
#56TIL we pay 10-20x more corp tax than Facebook. Sometimes I feel like a fool, but we've always said from day 1 try to do things as honestly as possible which I'm quite proud of, but there really doesn't seem to be much practical upside apart from not being outed and shamed. First world problem I guess, at least we're turning a profit. It is starting to make me a bit bitter though. For example, we've spent a LOT of tim…
You're not a fool, you're just not a multi-national with the ability to legally avoid/minimize tax.
Re: Facebook paid £4,327 corporation tax in the UK in 2014
#57No-one expects companies to pay the full whack of tax. But Facebook is taking the piss. They need to be a bit careful, because they risk causing much tighter tax regulation in EU. Citizens don't see this behaviour and think "well done, got one over on the government". Most citizens are infuriated by this scumbag behaviour. And before anyone says "they're just obeying the law" -- we don't know that. They're clearly no…
> "No-one expects companies to pay the full whack of tax."
Why? I don't understand why this is considered acceptable. I'm expected to pay the full whack of tax (income, VAT, etc), but somehow it's taken as given that corporations will pay 'less than they're supposed to'. How can we fix anything if this is the prevailing attitude?
Re: Facebook paid £4,327 corporation tax in the UK in 2014
#58I don't know if is the case of Facebook, but in general this is the story of most of tech companies, all are located in Ireland where they pay so much less taxes, and in rest of EU countries all this big companies pay this quantities or in the worse case the government return money.
EU is totally broken, one market with one tax per country; Obviously, all companies go to the country with less taxes. And the different is not 1% or 2% is like 10% or more.
Re: Facebook paid £4,327 corporation tax in the UK in 2014
#59My one-man-show consultancy pays far more than that in UK corporation tax. Of course that pisses me off, regardless of how you paint this whole tax avoidance scheme.
Someone said that "paying tax is for poor", and this goes a long way to support it.
Re: Facebook paid £4,327 corporation tax in the UK in 2014
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