So, what do we want to know this afternoon in the Parlimanetary Accounts Committee hearing fro Google, Starbucks and Amazon.
There are slight variations for each, of course, but fundamentally, I think my questioning would be:
1) What do you actually do, where?
2) How is that different from the way you record what you do? So, for example, if you sell in the UK why do you record it in Ireland?
3) If you say you sell from Luxembourg where is the bill sent from, and why, and how is that consistent with the claim that you're selling from another country?
4) Why do you buy coffee through Switzerland?
5) Who decides what you stock (in the case of Amazon)?
6) If you're selling from Ireland (Google) why are the adverts on a UK specific search engine?
7) Why is there an Amazon.co.uk if its a Luxembourg entity?
8) Why are so many royalites paid through the Netherlands?
9) Where does all the income from your sales in Ireland, Switzerland and Luxembourg end up so that you pay such low taxes outside the USA? Is it Bermuda, or Cayman?
10) If the money goes to Bermuda how does that benefit your shareholders when they can never access it without more tax being paid than you have decalred in yuour accounts?
11) If the money yopu're making can't be accessed by your shareholders are you really acting in their best interests? Or are you acting in management's interests?
12) How much case have you got offshore right now?
13) How many years of your accounts are not agreed by HMRC?
14) What adjustments have HMRC demanded to your tax declaration and why?
15) When were those adjustments made and why?
16) If you had to pay tax here would you leave? If so, why? And where would you go?
17) If not, why aren't you paying?
That will do for now. It will be interesting to see how many are answered.
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Well the Parlimanetary Accounts Committee is not being shown on BBC Parliament but I will be watching it live on the internet wondering how many will be answered.
Taxation of Multinational Corporations
The only questions I struggle with are (6) and (7).
Ultimately a domain name, or even tailoring a specific website to a specific country doesn’t indicate that something is a UK business.
For example the amazon.co.uk website appears to actually be based in the Republic of Ireland. You could perhaps argue that if somebody uses a domain name registered within the UK TLD (top level domain) then that counts as a UK permanent establishment, but then I could see something like http://www.amazonuk.com or http://www.amazon.com/uk coming into being. This also ignores the fact that following the same logic the USA could claim that every .com is a US permanent establishment.
I personally think it is best to stick to the physical aspects of the business, rather than those aspects of it that are entirely intangible and can quite easily be located elsewhere.
Would also be worth asking why all these companies suffer much higher effective tax rates in the US than they do in the UK/Europe? What are the IRS doing that HMRC are not? But that would also be a question for the HMRC, but perhaps the Committee could call some friendly witnesses from the IRS.
Have tried to find a table of the top 100 UK “Corporations” and the amount of Corporation Tax they pay? Where can one find which corporation pays their “fair share”
It seems very hard to determine.
In your position I would fight for the transparency and publication of such information.
I was expecting to see such a table on this site.
Adrian
i am working on it
One final question for Amazon, based on the fact that over 90% of their staff in Peterborough are eastern european, via agencies:
“As you are employing foreign nationals, and discriminating against Britains, and the agencies that are employing them are avoiding NI contributions too, shouldn’t you have the decency to trade from elsewhere? Like maybe Leichtenstein?”
I should also add that these agency workers are working nightshifts for the minimum wage.
Oh, and the agencies themselves are actively discriminating against brits.
So, at Amazon, there’s a pyramid tax avoidance scheme, from paying workers less than they deserve all the way through to the very top.
Isn’t capitalism just grand.