<i>The avoided taxes are corporate. All the VAT, taxes related to the jobs they've created (which are legion, as you yourself have admitted), local taxes (I am

<i>The avoided taxes are corporate. All the VAT, taxes related to the jobs they've created (which are legion, as you yourself have admitted), local taxes (I am unfamiliar with how these work in the UK, but I presume they exist)... are still being paid.</i> Amazon "sells" all the e-goods they can from a notional location in Luxembourg so that they can charge a 3% VAT rate on them. Small physical goods are / were shipped out of Jersey (although how many of them actually came from Jersey and how many were notionally shipped there and back again? Your guess is as good as mine...and I wouldn't put it past Amazon to push that little loophole as far as they possibly could) so that they incurred no VAT at all, until the government finally clamped down on that little scheme. Trust me, if they can avoid the VAT, they will do so, and pocket the difference at the expense of local suppliers who can't afford the economies of scale that would permit them to set up these schemes. And if you really think Starbucks artificially moving profits around by charging more than the market rate for coffee beans from it's own traders in a low-tax country is legal, I have a bridge to sell you. Unfortunately, the Inland Revenue just doesn't have the manpower to clamp down on the proliferation of ways in which companies can play these kind of "Hollywood Accounting" games, which is why some kind of alternate-minimum-tax approach is the only workable solution IMO. (Assuming you believe in corporation taxes in the first place of course, which is a whole separate kettle of fish!)