The government are quite happily coughing up £35bn of tax of our cash to "fight terrorism", yet are quite happily throwing only £32bn of tax at education.
I'd rather Google gave all their money directly in schemes like this than had it divvied up into the warmongers chests and pissed into running itself.
A cynical person would note that the UK government isn't upset that the loopholes are being used, since they've made no serious attempts to close them. They're upset that the loopholes are being used by the wrong companies.
If Apple or Google or Starbucks spent as much on UK lobbying as other multinationals, I doubt they'd be receiving any negative press.
HMRC change rules all the time to beat tax avoidance. They're hamstrung somewhat by European regulations that prevent them from penalising companies for hiding their profits in other EU countries. But it's a cat and mouse affair and the HMRC can only be reactive unless someone comes up with a perfect tax code.
>They're upset that the loopholes are being used by the wrong companies. //
You mean the richest, most successful, most popular, most used by the UK population and most profitable?
>I doubt they'd be receiving any negative press. //
So in your opinion the UK press is in the pocket of the government who're only highlighting morally questionable tax avoidance as part of a shake down to boost some sort of protection racket? That's what it sounds like you're saying.
Personally I think the answer lies in some sort of underpin based on gross revenue levied on all companies over the VAT registration threshold but with the option to apply to have the underpin removed if one can prove in good faith that the underpin is onerous.
Amazon could still pretend they're working out of Luxembourg (500 workers) instead of UK (15k workers) but they'd pay on their revenue anyway. That way Amazon can't put UK tax paying firms out of business (simply by undercutting and relying on the extra profit from not paying tax to stay a float) and then off-shore all the taxable profits leaving us with no UK tax paying businesses (but even more consumption).
Just think of all the high wage bills for accountants that could be saved.
> You mean the richest, most successful, most popular,
> most used by the UK population and most profitable?
I mean young companies that don't contribute as much to election campaigns as older companies.
> So in your opinion the UK press is in the pocket of the
> government who're only highlighting morally
> questionable tax avoidance as part of a shake down to
> boost some sort of protection racket? That's what it
> sounds like you're saying.
I'm not saying that the UK press is an organ of the government. Rather, individual members of the government are complaining only about companies that do not give them (sufficient?) kickbacks. The press merely reports on these complaints, because true investigative journalism is rapidly dying out.
The obvious solution is to close the "pick any EU nation to pay taxes in" loophole so companies are required to allocate taxes based in part on the geographical source of their revenue, but this would affect the companies that paid for those loopholes in the first place, so it will not soon happen.
If the government were actually interested in punishing companies that pay taxes to Ireland for profits in the UK, they would have just done it instead of kick up a flurry of press releases.
Google pay little to no corporation tax on profits in the UK (because they ship all of the profits overseas where Corporation tax isn't so expensive).
But Google employ lots of people in the UK so they do contribute a non-insignificant amount to the UK treasury in the way of taxes related to employees (PAYE/CGT on share option grants, NI, etc).
They do the former because they can, the do the latter because they must.
I love Sean Lock's comment on 8 out of 10 cats, comparing tax evasion with farting in an elevator. Sure, it's not legal ... (link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAcjntGQuCU)
