11–20 of 58 posts
Who pays corporation taxes on sales? I thought that's what VAT was for. Isn't corporation tax based on profit? If the cost of goods sold and expenses were £795m, then £1.2m on £5m in profit would seem pretty reasonable.
Vodafone, Starbucks, Google, Amazon, eBay.. As a person with a few companies in the UK that pay tax, it seems that the big companies can get away with whatever, where as last week I had someone from HRMC actually turn up at my house demanding payment because there had been a mixup with a £4k PAYE payment.. It beggers belief
From the article: > According to the Sunday Times, eBay had sales of £789m during 2010 in the UK at its four British subsidiaries. Using its worldwide profit margin of 23%, it would have made a profit in the UK of £181m, leading to corporation tax owed of £51m. That's making a pretty big assumption, that Ebay's UK profit margin is the same as its worldwide profit margin.
I don't understand why British news outlets have started to try and "shame" certain corporations over their tax returns. The practice has been known and used for many years, yet it's suddenly deemed newsworthy. I'm really surprised the BBC felt the need to report on this.
Why can't they change the tax law to tax these companies? I know it would be difficult, but it can't be impossible. These companies will always want to operate here.
In my opinion, every democratic country should make the following change to their laws: Politicians cannot own, or have a stake in, any commercial enterprise. Needs to be a bit refined but you get the idea.
Something I liked about how they dealt with it was they changed the law retrospectively meaning companies/individuals had to pay back tax they had avoided from previous years. I would love to see this done more where there is blatant tax avoidance.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bottom_of_the_harbour_tax_avoid...
Guess what, if you are an international company you can take advantage of the rules that the local politicians put in place.
I ask people though what do they really want? Do they want Ebay to pay 45% in tax to the UK so 350M pounds of tax revenue from Ebay? Then the next complaint will be "Gee nobody does business in our country!" and you have to take the train over to France or something to buy stuff from Ebay.
So the actual choices are "access to ebay" or "no access to ebay" which do you want?
Sigh, another story of "outrage" about how a company is legitimately avoiding taxation. Guess what, if you are an international company you can take advantage of the rules that the local politicians put in place. I ask people though what do they really want? Do they want Ebay to pay 45% in tax to the UK so 350M pounds of tax revenue from Ebay? Then the next complaint will be "Gee nobody does business in our country!"…
What an absurd argument.