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Amazon in £1.5bn tax fraud row
- tradersam 9y agoHard paywall. Not cool.
- dvfjsdhgfv 9y agoCan someone with subscription tell us what it's about?
- vacri 9y agoMy guess is that it's about the tax authorities accusing Amazon yesterday of failing to co-operate fully in tackling a multibillion-pound fraud that is putting scores of small British companies out of business.
- mikeyouse 9y agoNon-paywalled article: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/13/amazon-and-ebay-turning-blind-eye-to-vat-evasion-say-mps https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/13/amazon-an... > The criticisms were made on Wednesday at a meeting of the public accounts committee, parliament’s spending watchdog, which is investigating online VAT fraud. In recent years overseas sellers, particularly from China, have come to dominate many popular goods categories on eBay and Amazon, illegally selling products into the UK without paying VAT. As a result, many small British businesses have been undercut.
- dvfjsdhgfv 9y agoThat's definitely a valid concern. > “Twenty per cent is a large sum of money, and if your competitors are avoiding the 20% you can’t compete,” Twenty percent is huge in retail trade. Many sellers have single-digit margins. Having a huge player engaged in such behavior on a massive scale means effectively eliminating all competition. They should compete, but on equal terms. They will probably still win, but at the same time contribute to the well-being of the society by paying taxes (just like everyone else).
- tyingq 9y agoSimilarly, in the US, the Chinese sellers take advantage of the UPU shipping subsidies to artificially undercut sellers from other countries. "the USPS actually charges China Post less to deliver a package from China into the U.S. than it charges a U.S. business or customer to deliver a similar size package within the 48 states" http://www.nationalreview.com/article/439532/us-postal-service-subsidizes-china-other-countries-it-shouldnt http://www.nationalreview.com/article/439532/us-postal-servi...
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- hownottowrite 9y agoNot only that but they provide better service than US shippers to China receive from China Post. (speaking as a US shipper to China)
- hownottowrite 9y agoJust to be clear, what these merchants are doing is shipping into the UK and falsified customs forms. As Borders and Customs can't inspect and assess every single package, they slip through. However, if these companies filled out the forms properly, the end consumer would be picking up that VAT.
- gigatexal 9y agoCan we make it a point to not link to paywalled content please?
- mabbo 9y agoSlightly misleading title. The UK authorities are trying to lay £1.5bn in taxes on Amazon 3rd party sellers, and Amazon isn't helping enough to make that happen. The current title implies that it's Amazon who owes that tax, which isn't the case.
- fazkan 9y agocouldnt agree more...and to top it off they paywalled it...
- grahamel 9y agonothing wrong with a newspaper doing that, you can read it without paying: > Receive complimentary access to two articles from The Times and The Sunday Times every week
- pmjordan 9y agoI don't know if they still do it, but some years ago when I lived in the UK and later when I ordered something from amazon.co.uk while visiting, some items such as DVDs, which were marked as "sold by Amazon" were actually shipped by a channel islands (Jersey?) based company. The channel islands aren't in the EU or the UK's VAT system, so by splitting the order into shipments below the UK's import VAT threshold, they could avoid charging VAT. I don't know if that scheme still works, as non-EU businesses that do above a certain amount of EU based trade need to register for EU VAT. (including getting an "EU" prefixed VATIN)
- neilwilson 9y agoAnother advantage of leaving the EU. We can ditch the silly VAT system.
- mikeyouse 9y agoThe UK had a VAT before nearly anyone else in Europe.. It's vastly more likely that you'll have to deal with VAT on all European products in addition to the current products rather than getting rid of the VAT altogether.