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Every week there is a story in the UK press about how company A is not paying tax in the UK. This is not unique to Amazon. Vodafone, Amazon, Starbucks, Google,
by bruceboughton 14y ago
Every week there is a story in the UK press about how company A is not paying tax in the UK. This is not unique to Amazon.
Vodafone, Amazon, Starbucks, Google, Apple, ...
- wyclif 14y agoNot that taxes are out of control in the UK or anything...
- Tyrannosaurs 14y agoElaborate please?
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- DanBC 14y agoThere's a twist in asking customers to pay 20%, and taking that from the authors, and then (according to GP) not paying the 20% in England but paying just 3% in some other country.
- jonno 14y agoThis sounds fraudulent.
- DanBC 14y agoVodaphone's shenanigans so they only paid £1.2bn of the estimated £6bn total tax bill also sounds well dodgy.
- pja 14y agoYou can be quite sure that the contract is not phrased in such a way that Amazon is required to pay 20% VAT on the ebooks in question to the UK government. Is it sleazy as all getout? Yup, absolutely: but it's not illegal. Companies pull this kind of bait and switch all the time when they think they can get away with it. Remember when Microsoft bought the original Internet Explorer codebase in return for the company in question receiving a cut of the profits and then gave it away for free? How they must have laughed about that one back at MS HQ... In reality, the publishers handed Amazon a near monopoly on ebook sales by their own short-sightedness and now Amazon is turning the thumbscrews to see how much they're actually prepared to cough up. The games with VAT in the contract are just part and parcel of that.
- shinratdr 14y ago> How they must have laughed about that one back at MS HQ... Until they lost the lawsuit... http://www.windowsitpro.com/article/news2/microsoft-and-spyglass-kiss-and-make-up http://www.windowsitpro.com/article/news2/microsoft-and-spyg...
- tommorris 14y agoVAT is not the same as corporation tax. In the UK, Amazon is being accused of not paying the full amount of corporation tax they ought to be paying.
- rmc 14y agoIt's funny that then people give out about small countries that have lower coporation tax (e.g. Ireland). If companies in "non-low-tax" countries like UK don't pay any tax, why give out to low-tax countries?
- Tyrannosaurs 14y agoReminds me of the nice Starbucks joke from last week: I like my women like I like my coffee - paying tax on their income in the UK.
- skywalk 14y agoMost are setup to use a double irish scheme, and usually throw in the dutch sandwich: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_sandwich http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_sandwich
- PeterisP 14y agoThese schemes are relevant to corporate income tax, which can be manipulated and avoided. VAT applies to pretty much all revenue regardless of how you structure your company ownership structure.