The Great Debate on Tax Avoidance

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  • I'm not at all bothered by their tax practices and as for how they treat their staff if the staff aren't that happy they could always work else where.

    I understand the point Ron, but if you have no qualifications and a job in a Amazon warehouse is the only job around, Amazon are known to take full advantage of their employees in these positions.

  • But working for Amazon is not the only job that people with no qualifications can do, the fact that there are people doing the so called bad jobs for a so called bad employer, kind of suggests that the job and the employer aren't as bad as the media would have us believe.

  • I think it depends where in the country you live. If you in a city, there are more opportunities, if you live in a small town or the countryside, there are far less.

    When Amazon force people to run around their warehouses so that they are "efficient" or get their delivery drivers to do 200 deliveries a day, I know what I think about Amazon's polices and treatment of their own staff.

  • The bosses of Apple, Starbucks and others have said that they have a legal duty to their shareholders to reduce taxes and the burden upon the companies' finances. In the UK, we have the Companies Act that places that same onus on the directors of companies.

    Thanks, that's a fair clinching point in the stupid hypocrisy being peddled by politicians and the media

    The other point is the sheer arbitrariness of a country's tax demands. Granted, it is to balance the books, which means meeting the overheads of running a country and avoid the country going into hock. But what if a Government is wasting money though inefficiency, incompetence, extravagance or hair-brained initiatives? How does a citizen rectify that other than by holding on legally to as much as possible of his personal wealth when, at the booth, it has become Hobson's Choice?

    Has the band-aid or Utopian solution, of re-distribution of wealth, morphed into an unarguable moral imperative? Underlying fairness between rulers and the ruled breaks down when a chancellor says that with tax he is going to "squeeze the rich until the pips squeak" (viz Dennis Healey). Other Labour leaders like Corbyn and MacDonald also demonstrate an inbuilt animosity towards wealthy people or companies, fanning the flames of envy and resentment among the mass of voters who prefer the soft option of equality to the tougher one of equality of opportunity.

    The incontestable fact is that:

    1) Redistribution of wealth cannot benefit benefit the poor or un-wealthy. Indeed, it will be counter-productive because the rich will remove their money and, if necessary themselves, to saner financial climates and foreign investors will steer clear of Britain.

    2) On the bottom line, the rich are, wealth creators who add to the financial coffers of the country in which they or their businesses reside (even those with an obscenely sybaritic lifestyle). But this holds no sway with the voting mob masses - the private yacht is like waving a rag in front of a bull. Granted, the wealth created for the country by the rich could be more but that's charity, dressed up as patriotism or good citizenship or eligibility for a Knighthood. Meanwhile, what Britain gets from the rich is a bloody sight better than nothing and we should stop bitching.

  • I don't believe as a conservative voter that to make someone wealthy, you make someone else poor. You don't bring those down from their golden infested towers, but instead try to help those who are at the bottom and looking up and wishing they were there too.

    That said, the policy of companies and wealthy individuals avoiding tax is morally wrong, if not legally wrong. Why should the rest of us peasants pay tax when those who are the most powerful, don't or pay far less?

    You could sort out a lot of this mess in a second by eliminating taxes such as IHT and bringing down the corporate and individual higher rates of tax to something more sensible, certainly not 40%!

    If I had to hand over 40% of my dosh to the government, I'd do every tax "planning" measure there is.

    The inefficiency of government and wasting money is a massive topic in itself, I don''t think there is a thread for that here yet. Perhaps if the State spent every £1 it received efficiently, then the rich might do less tax sheltering measures.

    I don't care whether someone has a yacht, but I do care if they pay an effective tax rate of 0.005% as in the recent Irish/Amazon debacle.

  • I think it depends where in the country you live. If you in a city, there are more opportunities, if you live in a small town or the countryside, there are far less.

    When Amazon force people to run around their warehouses so that they are "efficient" or get their delivery drivers to do 200 deliveries a day, I know what I think about Amazon's polices and treatment of their own staff.

    I guess it depends whether or not you believe what is said in the media about certain companies or not.

  • As I say, I'd be totally happy with Amazon paying tiny taxes if other small UK based businesses could too.

    Democracy is against me though and as a democrat (just about) I have to accept the majority view which is that most people don't care about corporate level tax fiddling. Obviously taking your business elsewhere would make a difference...!

  • I guess some of us just haven't the time and/or inclination to care about everything.

    True but it's so easy to do something in this case it must be very low down on the list of things to care about. As I say, if there's no great interest in corporate tax fiddling that's fine, democracy at work! Remainers have to accept Brexit, I have to accept corporate tax dodging. I will continue to bring it up when the issue arises of course...

  • There is a viable % somewhere between 0.005 and 40% !

    When you say avoiding tax is morally wrong I'm sure what you mean is "avoiding paying more tax than the law and the tax rules demand you should be paying". Why would anyone want to pay more tax than necessary? (They can always pay for a Knighthood separately!)

    Whenever a reporter or tv newscaster witters on about tax avoidance they invariably misleadingly translate that into "avoiding paying tax", which to most people is interpreted as avoiding paying any tax at all. Sometimes that is true (zero tax) because the tax rules end up being binary , where one is either liable or not liable to pay that tax. It is the responsibility of the Government tax collector, not the tax payer, to make the rules less stupid.

    Over the last 50 or so years, history has shown time and time again, that the mega rich only become aggressively tax-avoiding when a Government becomes aggressively tax-greedy. Fair's fair, don't you think?

  • One thing that is intriguing me, but nobody else seems to have mentioned is who leaked this information and how did they obtain it, and what other information could they have access too, for all intents and purposes this is a breech of security and data information protection protocols, but since it's large corporations, rich and famous etc, we seem ok to overlook that if it.

  • It'll be a banker or an accountant who organised it all and then has "seen the light" and decided his clients should come under a little bit more scrutiny than they currently do.

    I wonder when we'll get to the "real" tax havens where the super rich hide their dosh, as well as other things. Trip to Tashkent anyone...?

  • the policy of companies and wealthy individuals avoiding tax is morally wrong

    If I had to hand over 40% of my dosh to the government, I'd do every tax "planning" measure there is.

    If the amount of your dosh was just on the lower limit of what attracts a 40% tax liability you couldn't afford or justify the tax planning methods required to make a significant saving. The game wouldn't be worth the candle.

    Why should less than 0.5% of the population earning £1m pay £400,000 in tax if they can legally whittle it down to £100,000? Where is the immorality in that?

    Where is the morality and sanity in having tax rules that allow a person or company to reduce their tax bill?

    If you bought a house for £999,999 rather than £1m so as to avoid falling into the next stamp duty tax band, would that be immoral?

    If you entertain a multi-national client to get new business, and it's tax deductible if the business you would like to get from one of his foreign subsidiaries and but not tax deductible if it's from his UK subsidiary. Since you don't know which subsidiary that new business is going to come from or indeed, if any materialises, which label to you attach to that entertainment expense in your tax submissions?

    If your UK-based distribution company sells tinned food where the produce comes from a low tax country, where do you incorporate your main company for the concentration of most of your sales income and outgoings: the UK or that low- tax country that has the produce?

    If the answer is to choose the high-tax option, is that an indication of morality or insanity?

    And where is the morality in screwing your shareholders?

  • I think Apple's tax payment of 0.005% to Ireland's tax authority based on its revenues from across Europe, was wholly immoral. Legal, but immoral when small business' cannot afford armies of consultants to fiddle the books. And Apple paying itself to lease it's own brand name, or whatever the wheeze was, to get round paying tax, should be criminal.

  • I think Apple's tax payment of 0.005% to Ireland's tax authority based on its revenues from across Europe, was wholly immoral. Legal, but immoral when small business' cannot afford armies of consultants to fiddle the books. And Apple paying itself to lease it's own brand name, or whatever the wheeze was, to get round paying tax, should be criminal.

    As a multi-billion multi-national company with responsibility to its shareholders, within the constraints of ethics and morality, which of these 3 p[aces would you feel is the right choice to park your company?

    Country A with the fifth largest economy in the world (so they say), a reasonable standard of living but with a government that seeks to impose a high taxation.

    Country B which is very poor, practically Third World, which would a welcome a minor tax contribution , especially if also buying or renting office or factory space and employing local workers most of whom couldn't otherwise find employment.

    Country C which is very poor/Third World which would welcome a minor contribution in tax, rentals and local employment but where all of this low tax and modest generated wealth goes into the pockets of that country's dictator and his cronies, while the citizens continue to live in abject poverty

    To whatever extent you might be inclined to choose country A, how would you feel if, additionally, that country's citizens and Government was ambivalent about wealth, so increasingly incompetent that it might be replaced by an extreme left-wing Government that would be even more hostile to wealth-creating companies that seek to avoid paying more tax than necessary.

  • I don't disagree that what these companies is doing is anything but legal and as I already said, the Companies Act makes it incumbent upon directors to gain the maximum benefit possible for their shareholders, but this is not a level playing field. High street book shops (are there any left?) or a family run cafe cannot move compete with the likes of Amazon or Starbucks. They cannot move their profits around between different countries, or lease their own brands back to themselves, or whatever other trickery pokery the accountants come up with.

    The rate of tax rates in all the developed world should be lowered and laws need to be brought in which say that companies and wealthy individuals must pay the correct tax rate on their profits,otherwise they are committing a criminal offence.

  • The bosses of Apple, Starbucks and others have said that they have a legal duty to their shareholders to reduce taxes and the burden upon the companies' finances. In the UK, we have the Companies Act that places that same onus on the directors of companies.

    Cute point, except that the overriding majority of shareholders of Apple, Starbucks, Amazon etc are US rather than UK citizens.

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