Fee and KJ get a tour of one of the global tech giants...
SOURCE GUARDIAN: Facebook paid £4,327
corporation tax despite £35m staff bonuses
Facebook made an accounting loss of £28.5m in Britain in
2014, after paying out more than £35m to its 362 staff in a share bonus scheme,
according to the unit’s latest published accounts. Operating at a loss meant
that Facebook was able to pay less than £5,000 in corporation tax to HM Revenue
for the year. The level of tax contribution by Facebook, which claimed in 2013
that at least a third of UK adults visited its site every day, will add to the
debate about how to ensure that multinationals make fair tax payments in each
country in which they operate. Last year, Facebook made a profit on its
worldwide operations of $2.9bn (£1.9bn), on revenue of $12.5bn. UK revenues
were £105m last year. John Christensen, the director of campaign group the Tax
Justice Network, said: “it’s very likely they’re using all the usual techniques
to shift profits around.” George Osborne, the chancellor, has pledged to crack
down on tax avoidance by global firms by swiftly legislating to enact a new set
of rules drafted by the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development (OECD), which has become a hub for global tax reform in recent
years. The so-called BEPS rules are aimed at cracking down on “base erosion and
profit-shifting”: the practices used by many global firms to minimise their tax
liabilities by recording profits in low-tax jurisdictions. “Taxes should be
paid where profits are made,” Osborne tweeted from the International Monetary
Fund’s annual meetings last week. Separately, the chancellor has introduced a
diverted profits tax, known as the “Google tax”, aimed at preventing hi-tech
international firms from minimising their tax liabilities in the UK.
