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Facebook paid £4,327 corporation tax in the UK in 2014

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Facebook paid £4,327 corporation tax in the UK in 2014

#101

Post by Cakez0r »

snorrah wrote: post #73

Shameful. Just shameful. I don't care how it gets sugar coated, if you claim to be working for the good of humanity (in facebooks case by connecting people together) and then you loophole yourself out of paying taxes, you are morally bankrupt.

I wouldn't be so quick to condemn them. If you were running a business that had earned millions in profit for the financial year and were faced with the option of A) distributing it all out to your employees in the form of bonuses (which, of course, would be taxed) or putting all the profit in the bank and paying a huge tax bill, which would you pick? This seems like a good example of wealth trickling down to me, but it's painted as tax evasion.

Re: Facebook paid £4,327 corporation tax in the UK in 2014

#102

Post by ropiku »

Marazan wrote: post #26
mrkmcknz wrote: post #18

The 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…

If they hold them for 5 years there is no Cap Gains tax to be paid on the shares. Arguing that the tax employees pay should be taken into account when calculating a companies tax provision lacks merit. That's employees tax not the companies - this is especially true for companies such as Starbucks where if they were not monopolising high street space by abusing the tax system and small local coffee shop would happily…

The cap gain is only paid on the profit made when selling. RSUs are taxed as regular income when they are awarded. Most likely the employees are high rate tax payers so it comes out at 40-45% tax + National Insurance.

Re: Facebook paid £4,327 corporation tax in the UK in 2014

#103

Post by RegW »

amirmc wrote: post #57
DanBC wrote: post #4

No-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?

> Why?

... because we don't call out those that do, praise them and give them our custom.

Re: Facebook paid £4,327 corporation tax in the UK in 2014

#104

Post by mootothemax »

mrkmcknz wrote: post #18

The 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…

>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.

Why should Facebook get to enjoy an advantage over 36 companies employing 10 people each at a similar average salary?

>If I had a choice between Facebook paying £4,327 in corporation tax but employing over 350 highly skilled individuals in the UK, or relocating to somewhere like Dublin due to aggressive taxation policies. I know what I would pick.

You'd prefer every large company to be based in the UK and not pay corporation tax?

Of course not.

Personally, I think we're long overdue another huge waste like DeLorean coming along.

Re: Facebook paid £4,327 corporation tax in the UK in 2014

#105

Post by TomGullen »

stegosaurus wrote: post #68

Re-posting my comment from the Guardian thread that came up earlier ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10371728 ) Corporation tax in the UK is payable on 'profits subject to corporation tax'. In laymen's terms this is roughly equivalent to to accounting profit. Employee salaries, bonuses, etc are generally deductible; if you pay me 50K, that's 50K out of your bottom line. The employees in question likely pay a va…

What about scrapping corp tax, and replacing with a higher VAT rate?

Re: Facebook paid £4,327 corporation tax in the UK in 2014

#106

Post by lsaferite »

raverbashing wrote: post #93
jkahn wrote: post #12

Global 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…

Well, how much Apple money stays outside of the US because it was paid there? Also, how much VAT and other taxes are charged in an iPhone sold in Europe Same for Facebook, their ads generate VAT. Their employees there pay income tax.

As much as the minuscule corp tax bills infuriate me, my logical half laughs and says income tax is silly, just use sales tax.

I know we'll never pass something along the lines of FairTax, but I daydream about it all the time. And yes, I've heard all the arguments against it and I still think it's a much better solution than taxing income.

Re: Facebook paid £4,327 corporation tax in the UK in 2014

#107

Post by JupiterMoon »

pja wrote: post #20

So they paid next to no corporation tax. Meanwhile their employees will have paid a stack of income tax & the new rules on VAT should mean that all Facebook Ad sales to UK customers are subject to UK VAT. I don’t think the UK is being shortchanged all that much. When Google/FB et al were able to shift Ad sales to low-VAT regime holding companies, that was definitely taking the piss. This? Meh.

This argument is not valid. Yes they are paying VAT and income tax. So what? They should also be paying corporation tax. A start up competitor would have to pay VAT, income tax and corporation tax.

Re: Facebook paid £4,327 corporation tax in the UK in 2014

#108

Post by DanBC »

ams6110 wrote: post #97
snorrah wrote: post #73

Shameful. Just shameful. I don't care how it gets sugar coated, if you claim to be working for the good of humanity (in facebooks case by connecting people together) and then you loophole yourself out of paying taxes, you are morally bankrupt.

If the tax law allows it, they have no reason to pay more than they do. To do so would be not in the interests of their owners/shareholders. If you have a problem with tax "loopholes" then fix the tax law. Don't blame a business for paying only the tax it is legally obligated to pay. Would YOU pay more taxes than you have to?

>Would YOU pay more taxes than you have to?

Most people pay more tax than they need to because they don't have access to devious accountants who create excessive tax-avoidance schemes.

Most of these schemes are neither normal tax planning nor a bit of tax avoidance. They are aggressive tax avoidance that exploit the regulations in weird ways. They're legal, but only because the regulations were malformed (and will get re-made) or because the schemes haven't been tested in courts.

And the way UK tax authorities work is rightly to use courts as a measure of last resort, preferring negotiation instead.

Re: Facebook paid £4,327 corporation tax in the UK in 2014

#109

Post by JupiterMoon »

The thing that large corporations should remember is the the UK is one of the few countries in the world that can pass retrospective legislation and then enforce it (this has happened on tax issues as recently as the 2000s). At some stage a UK government is going to claw back this money and I think it won't be pretty for anyone. (NB I fundamentally don't agree with the concept of retrospective legislation I'm merely saying the UK can do it.)

Re: Facebook paid £4,327 corporation tax in the UK in 2014

#110

Post by throwaway2048 »

ams6110 wrote: post #97
snorrah wrote: post #73

Shameful. Just shameful. I don't care how it gets sugar coated, if you claim to be working for the good of humanity (in facebooks case by connecting people together) and then you loophole yourself out of paying taxes, you are morally bankrupt.

If the tax law allows it, they have no reason to pay more than they do. To do so would be not in the interests of their owners/shareholders. If you have a problem with tax "loopholes" then fix the tax law. Don't blame a business for paying only the tax it is legally obligated to pay. Would YOU pay more taxes than you have to?

guess who lobbies the government for these type of loopholes to begin with?
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