> "Facebook paid just £28m tax after record £1.6bn revenues in UK" because they fiddle it with offshore tax havens while normal UK businesses have to pay more l

> "Facebook paid just £28m tax after record £1.6bn revenues in UK" because they fiddle it with offshore tax havens while normal UK businesses have to pay more like 30% of their income in tax, not 1.7%. This conflates a few things. As I'm an American, I'm going to speak about US tax law, but concept should be applicable. No normal US business is paying taxes on their _revenues_, they're paying taxes on their earnings (profit, roughly speaking). So if you made $1B in revenue selling $1 bills for $0.50, you'd have lost $500M and not have to pay taxes on top of that. The point about fiddling with where revenue is accrued to impact tax rates is true, but the more accurate way to phrase it would be "FB paid only $X in taxes after record $XXX earnings in the UK". This isn't always as simple to derive, but you could back into an estimation of it by taking revenue from UK businesses and subtracting UK headcount and purchases made in the UK or from UK businesses. The tax number they'd owe is definitely higher (and there's a very strong argument that they should pay this rate), but it's not anywhere near "corporate tax rate * revenue in country" (or worse, global revenue).