

Facebook: The antisocial network branded 'disingenuous and immoral' - grey-area
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/facebook-the-antisocial-network-branded-disingenuous-and-immoral-8206123.html

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DanBC
> _Company pays only £238,000 in corporation tax on UK earnings of up to
> £175m_

It might be legal[1], but it's deeply disliked among regular tax-payers.
Especially when we're going through austerity measures.

You want to do business in Europe? Pay your taxes; obey our laws.

[1] No-one is suggesting FB is evading tax. But sometimes tax avoidance
schemes are borderline illegal and you're just waiting for a loophole to be
closed.

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grey-area
I suppose Facebook is coming close to the line here by avoiding tax in quite
an agressive way. It's still not classed as evasion, but it's getting pretty
close if they are paying risible taxes on huge earnings (though it must be
remembered that these are estimates). Of course the individual employees must
pay tax, but the company itself should too.

If they hire people in London, pay them in London, find clients in London,
service those clients in London, and then book the payment through Eire, is
that simply a bookkeeping exercise to avoid paying corporation tax? If so I'd
expect the law to be changed eventually to account for this, as it was for
Amazon's offshoring to avoid VAT, as otherwise companies like Amazon, Google,
Apple and Facebook pay very little corporation tax (sometimes even none) on
huge profits and yet use the resources, talent and infrastructure of the host
country. I can see this becoming more and more of a problem as it becomes
easier for global companies to shop for jurisdictions and move nominal profits
from one country to another.

