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Amazon, Google and Apple Won't Need To Pay Tax, Despite Goverment Threats
girlmad writes "Despite moves by government to get Google, Amazon and Apple to admit they make sales in the UK and US, and therefore should pay tax on these earnings, this article argues these are empty threats and that any taxes paid will get returned to the tech giants in government grants and subsidies. Tough luck to the small firms out there."
why class warfare is alive and well and why everyone hates the government so fucking much?
And for those of you who think this is partisan-minded, the "other" guys (hah! what a joke) would have done exactly the same.
sales tax wherever they sell stuff, and income tax in some other country
on BBC parliament. Some suited slimeball operating in full corporate bullshit mode, explaining to a panel of MP's why a UK company buying UK advertising from a UK sales team and paying the bill in sterling to a UK bank account somehow doesn't count as a sale in the UK, all the while his fat tax auidtor lackey smiled and nodded along.
I don't really have a problem with Google knowing more about me than my own mother when I am awash with the blissful fantasy that they are progressive company, run by and for engineers who's general dealings with government are along the lines are "the future is here, deal with it granddad." When I see them acting just like every other multinational, and needing to be reminded several times by the committee chair that their corporate moto is "don't be evil" I suddenly realize that we may have taken our eyes off the ball far too long when it comes to google, and the era of large scale exploitation and manipulation by multinational mega-corps has only just begun.
We need millions of taxpayers, especially small businesses to not only refuse to pay their taxes but dare the government to arrest them for tax evasion until we have a fair and easy to enforce tax code. When I say dare, I mean in the sense of forcing the government to literally go to war or back down and fix the system.
Good for Apple and Google. The government didn't earn the money they want to take. The people at Apple and Google worked hard to earn that money, why should it be stolen from them to pay for giveaways to non-workers?
Oh Slashdot, you used to actually have some substantive posts. Now... This. What kind of "news" writer wrote that article?
Don'tcha know.
Rick B.
The west as a whole has declined into Fascism. You can only expect fascist policy to take hold.
Oh wait, I forgot rule number whatever. "Whenever a rich and important company or person says they're for a tax that should cover them, SURPRISE it ends up covering everybody except them." (OOhh, I'll call it the Buffett Rule.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Megacorps hiring legions of lawyers, accountants and lobbyists to limit/eliminate their tax liabilities. And politicians sucking up to the money bags whilst feigning outrage for the little guy. I'm shocked....just shocked, I say.
Ahh ha ha! Why do you guys make me read this shit? They know we're just going to tax the crap out of them to pay for hooker and cocaine parties for Washington lobbyists! Why LIE to them? !#%!WA
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Google, Apple and Amazon are not doing anything wrong. They are in business to make money for their stockholders of which many I bet are UK citizens. In some jurisdictions they are legally REQUIRED to operate their enterprises to the best legal advantage of their stockholders.
Those UK citizens pay taxes on the dividends and capital gains they realize from owning stock in these companies. Not only that but these companies provide extremely useful services to UK citizens thereby enriching their lives.
They ALSO employ many people who ALSO pay taxes on their wages, and by being employers relieve the state from having to pay for the upkeep of these people who would otherwise be on the dole.
Not only that but there are other taxes on value added transactions that result from the economic activities involved. Consumption based taxes are generally viewed to have the least negative impact on economic growth of any taxes.
Then of course there is the whole question of the macroeconomics of the situation. It is generally held that taxes on businesses are inefficient in terms of encouraging economic growth. Such policies are not productive overall to the economy. This is why business taxes in Europe are generally relatively low. It is conscious sound policy decision based on scientific analysis of the economic facts.
http://ec.europa.eu/europe2020/pdf/themes/02_taxation.pdf
In other words this is a completely RUBBISH article in every way possible.
Just wanted to point out that as of right now the headline says "Goverment", an obvious typo that any dim-witted person should have caught.
The laziness and sloppiness of the content is typical slashdot.
So it would seem that taxes, like laws, are for little people. Whereas writing the specs for the laws and the taxes, well that's for the corporations (which are people!) and for the special 1% big people. Well, no one said life was going to be fair, did they? :>)
Small firms have it so rough and they deserve our pity, even though they have lobbyist groups like Confederation of British Industry who will make sure that small firms don't have to make up for the loss in tax revenue.
Fuck the people who lose out on services and have to pay higher taxes to make up for the lack of revenue, though. Those people clearly don't deserve pity because they aren't a business or corporation. Only businesses deserve our pity.
I've been following this whole shitfest in the UK quite closely for the past few months, and one amusing thing has consistently struck me - the government are trying to be the goody-goody party in all of this, claiming that the companies involved are being evil and ethically corrupt when it comes to "fair share" taxation, while at the very same time flat out refusing to acknowledge that those companies are not doing anything illegal under the current tax regime.
The government also has ruled out changing the tax law to prevent the current behaviours,because then they lose the trivially easy PR they get from "taking the companies to task" infront of Parliament and the media.
It's time to admit that the current tax law doesn't work once you are above PAYE (that's the government standard taxation for employees - normal people in the UK do not have to do any filings because it's all done by the HMRC for them and tax is taken out of their pay checks each month).
Setting up a company in the UK costs about $40. Doing annual returns for that company costs about $350. By working for that company for no wage, and taking out directors dividends, you save serious amounts of money through not having to pay income tax as the Corporate tax rates are significantly smaller than the income tax rates. This scheme is so heavily and widely used, even MPs in all parties got shamed earlier this year when they were named using it - but it's still completely legal.
No one should be expected to voluntarily pay more tax than they legally are required to, and no one should be shamed for not paying more tax than they are legally required to - if you want someone to pay more tax than they are legally required to, then legally require them to pay more tax! Don't beat around the bush, change the fucking law.
Tim Cook seems to claim the opposite:
So is he a bare-faced liar, or is the article summary bollocks? Sources please.
Your employer who neglected you owes a million dollars tax
And their rival's still perfecting ways of cooling server racks
You better stop; look around
Here it comes, here it comes, here it comes...
Democracy and Capitalism do NOT mix.
Time to end corporate citizenship - a federal judge has already ruled that corporations are not citizens, therefor do not have the same protections under the law as citizens do.
Join move to amend, end their citizenship, end spending money as a form of speech, end our government sellout.
The article doesn't say, but it appears that when it says "tax" it is referring to *income* tax. For some reason, a lot of people forget that corporations, unlike people, pay income tax on NET rather than gross. In other words, the corporation pays all of its expenses, then pays income tax on what is left over. Those expenses include your salary, your benefits, new capital projects, and so on. Meanwhile, the real tax burden of the organization is much higher when you add in all the other taxes they are paying: sales tax, property tax, tariffs, and so on. The story that these corporations aren't paying very much in "taxes" is a gross distortion. They just aren't paying very much in income taxes, which is by design.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
This article is about google and amazon in the UK. In an attempt at link baiting, there is a single line about apple in the US in the article so they would write Apple in the headline for clicks.
And slashdot fell for it - and so did I.
Good! Every business should learn from these companies and do the same. Hopefully it will eventually end the legalized theft/extortion which statists call "taxes".
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2326897/Google-tax-avoidance-row-Internet-giant-accused-scandalous-tax-avoidance-scheme-whistleblower.html
*Shrug*
So, now Google and Apple are the new robber-baron bogeyman scapegoats for the politicians. They don't deserve compensation for dubious honor of such a noble self-sacrifice in service to humanity? :-)
Just read a scaremongering article about the creepier aspects of Google-enabled, well, everything. For the record, it's not Google that's creepy to me, or, I think, to anyone else. It's the tech itself, or what the fact that it scares people tells us about ourselves individually, and collectively, on conscious and unconscious levels. It's going to take us a long time to adjust to it, but the cows are out the gate now, and there's no getting them back now, except at a cost too horrible to contemplate. Some say at a cost too past due to avoid, but that's another story that Mr. Heinlein covered elsewhere. Or, some say, Revelations. Or others, some other apocalyptic, prophetic, Wellsian vision. Morlocks and Eloi. Or the Runts of 61-Cygni C, maybe.
You really have to give Google credit for at least trying to keep things on a positive note, in fact. And it's not just Google, or Apple. This one, or that one. Lot of old-school usual suspects are getting to fly in under the radar while the high-profile tech companies get the heat.
What about, oh, say, IAC, or all the other click-tracking and media companies, eh? The ones that put all those crap toolbars and BHOs on Windoze boxes and Firefox, Chrome, etc. You know, all that spyware, adware, and Trojan installing malware that would be called a criminal botnet if you or I suckered anyone into installing them. All you techs who spend your days cleaning up this dreck know what I'm talking about. MyWebSearch, Ask.com (Oracle, what the hell were you thinking???) etc, etc, etc. But, it's publicly traded, so it can't be a crime, right? By definition. And therein lies the problem, the key to everything. Maybe I'll take that up at another time, or another place. Just saying that the problem really aint whether Google (or Apple, or whatever) is good or evil. Save that for the rubes, please.
which is, most countries tax profits made within their borders. That is, if Google made money in France, then they must pay taxes in France. So, demanding that these companies pay taxes twice, on the same overseas profits, is not reasonable. Which, IIRC, was the point of why the tax exception was written that way.
Republican leadership = Idiocracy
In fiscal year 2012, Apple paid $6 billion in federal corporate income taxes, which is 1 out of every 40 dollars in corporate income taxes collected by the U.S. government, said Steve Dowling, a company spokesman.
“That makes Apple one of the top corporate income tax payers in the country, if not the largest,” he said.
From http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-05-02/apple-avoids-9-2-billion-in-taxes-with-debt-deal.html
The summary places the subject partly within the context of the recent sales tax debate in the US. The article doesn't talk about this, nor does it make any mention of grants and subsidies from the US. Even if it did, this would be missing the point. The taxes would not simply be "empty threats", whatever that means here. Even if the companies receive benefits from the government, they have cause to fear paying sales tax because of the way it would change consumer behavior.
The government's sole purpose of this action is to put into place more mechanisms to extract new taxes. The standard way all elected governments of the world get away with sticking it to the people with more unfair laws is to play the long game and start really small.
The gov knows that once the basic mechanism is in place, it is irreversible, consequently they initally make it sound harmless and agree to anything to get it in place (even initially giving up any benefit, such as that all the collected taxes all get returned to the big companies) because the gov know they can gradually tweak the new mechanism's parameters later when the spotlight isn't on them. This is government tactics 101, people.
For some reason, a lot of people forget that corporations, unlike people, pay income tax on NET rather than gross
But corporations are people. Why can't I pay income taxes on my net rather than gross?
Have gnu, will travel.
... eliminate all corporate taxes? Will that draw international corporations to come here. It probably would ... until ... they realize that we are taxing the people so hard that the cost of employing them here is too high. So they would just set up headquarters here, and hire the actual production people (workers) wherever they are the cheapest. So what do we gain? I say just drive them out.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
...claiming that the companies involved are being evil and ethically corrupt when it comes to "fair share" taxation, while at the very same time flat out refusing to acknowledge that those companies are not doing anything illegal under the current tax regime.
Completely true and the government certainly shoulders some of the blame but they are also stuck in a very hard place. They could certainly change the tax law but the problem is how? They are up against multi-national corporations who will do anything they can to avoid paying tax and have armies of lawyers and a global reach to do just that. It is hard to see how any tax law can actually stop these companies and billionaires without being so strict, severe or complex that it will hurt smaller companies.
I agree nobody should be expected to pay more tax voluntarily than the law allows but, at the same time, calling an individual or a house a company simply to avoid income tax or stamp duty is going completely against the spirit of the law. Yes government can pass laws to block each new loop hole but you'll end up with tax laws that fill a library and the cost of filing your taxes will soar. This, ultimately, is the problem with laws: there is always some way to circumvent them if you try hard enough. Fixing the law is not the issue here we need to fix the attitude of the companies and billionaires who have benefitted greatly from society and now need to contribute to it at at least the same rate as the rest of us.
Does anyone who seriously uses the cliche that "taxes are theft" deserve to be treated as anything other than a troll? I'm all for open debate with anyone serious, including those who would all but abandon (in the US) the federal government. However, even anarchists may admit that some taxes are necessary. "Taxes are theft" is just a childish rant and should be treated as such.
I am buying apps like no other as part of my business. In normal business you work with buying and selling and VAT is no problem. Apple however does not send bills with VAT, Apple states they are not done negotiating with the government. I had to read this two or three times.. what on eath do you have to negotiate on VAT. It is really clear: all business have to pay. Now the Added in Value Added Taxes i have to pay is higher than it should be, there goes part of my profits, thank you Apple!
The entire country *could* take Amazon, Google, and Apple by the nuts and make them *beg* to pay taxes, but we just don't have that kind of resolve as a citizenry. I think things are moving in the right direction with new mobile apps like Buycott, but seriously....can't people give up their sense of convenience for just a little bit so that we can work to correct some *major* problems with the current political/social structure?
...to the real cyberpunk world. Megacorporations don't rule the world, they let that dirty work be handled by governments. Instead, the have found a way to corrupt our politics in such a way that we are actually subsidising megacorporations and small companies and taxpayers are footing the bill.
I just hope that the time when history looks upon this period and asks whether we were all insane isn't too far off.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
As usual, the EU will find some way to squeeze Microsoft through frivolous anti-trust charges in order to pay the tax deficit from Google, Amazon, Apple and other tax dodgers. Unlike those companies Microsoft actually pays it's taxes.
any taxes paid will get returned to the tech giants in government grants and subsidies
This is nothing a worldwide boycott won't take care of.
All this talk of sales, and talk that government could "enforce tax as a percentage of earnings on all companies".
Corporation tax is paid on PROFITS, not sales / earnings. And as for the large amounts made by some of these sales - e.g. Google's supposed £3.2 billion sales. Well, this year they agreed a £1 billion property deal for new headquarters in London - that might impact on profits somewhat...
HMRC has done some questionable things with relation to some companies, and yes, we need to ensure that all companies are paying tax fairly, and playing by the same rules. But there is a shocking amount of "me too" reporting over this issue, that glosses over the facts, presents information in a way that confuses rather than illuminates the issue, and often just gets the sums plain wrong.
From TFA
Did she take into account the savings Amazon made to private citizens? Did she take into account reductions in global emissions due to shared delivery trucks?
Do not assume the only thing going on is all government-oriented. Certain factions want you to think that way, but don't. Walmart saves the US consumers over $200 billion per year.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
The comparison between Apple, Google and Amazon here is completely misleading. Apple stated that it paid $6 Billion in US taxes last year. The taxation on the $100 Billion is a completely different situation that doesn't compare to the situations outlined with Amazon and Google.
I run a small IT company in the UK. What infuriates me is that my start-up is subject to onerous rates of taxation whereas a large foreign competitor is able to avoid a considerable portion of its tax bill. One of the key functions of government is that it needs to be there to ensure that the rules that ensure that capitalism can function are in place and are not being circumvented by any of the participants in the market. Failure to apply these rules across the board means that the market becomes distorted and the system fails to behave in a healthy fashion. This is what happens in developing countries and it is what makes them poor. The UK is getting poorer for many reasons but a key reason is our rising tide of corruption - which this is an example of. Recent articles by professor Niall Ferguson discuss the failure of Western institutions being core to our waning power... this is a clear example of that. The Law must apply to all in equal measure.
I say tie grant money (if there should be any is another debate) to taxes. In order to keep the grant money you have to have taxable income in the country. Essentially make them non-refundable tax credits. Also make them only able to be applied to a certain percentage of the total taxes due so that companies have to claim/repatriation large amounts in order to get their write-offs.
Another option: taxes owed are a function of where you do business. If you are registered in the US but claim that your income is from overseas prove it. I say something like 70% is weighted based on where real dollars in the bank account originate (do what you want with US companies getting money from your country but US dollars going to US companies are going to get taxed period) not where you attribute them (doing shinanigans like claiming Cokes recipe is owned by a company in the Bahamas and the US revenue is paying huge royalties doesn't cut it). The other 30% would be where your employees are. That gives a bit of wiggle room for companies that legitimately do hire a lot of their staff overseas to actually assign a portion of their business to where it is actually being operated. Businesses are essentially operations and sales and both should be taken into account when calculating taxes not some shady circular ownership plan that allows them to claim to operate out of a lawyers office even with 10's of thousands of employees in country and negligable customers in the their "operating" country.
Govt doesn't need our taxes. Govt can print currency.
Govt is imposing taxes to CONTROL/MANIPULATE the citizens.
https://goo.gl/ep9Qz
Casteism
Isn't that always the way it goes - Activists demand more taxes for the rich, the government makes new taxes that the ultra-rich are exempt from - classic government in action.
That's why they are not repatriating the profits they earn outside the US. Corporate tax rates are too high -- the government would likely collect more revenue from lower rates, as firms would be less likely to shelter earnings from the taxman.
LOL.
I was reading this article and heading the "You may also like to read" section "First fully 3D Printed Gun..."
I dunno mates, but out here we are getting a very weird image of you USians as gun-crazed anti-tax jihadists.
Just joking.
-- 29A the number of the Beast
the recent hearings in DC are just for public spectacle. elected officials have no intention of bearing down on apple & google & microsoft -- they're just pulling a "look over there" maneuver, in order to distract the population from other matters -- like how 5 years after Obama was elected, we're still paying $79 billion to fund the war effort in Afghanistan. They're all a bunch of lowlife criminals, our "representatives", completely self-serving and generally immune to the effects of the laws which affect the rest of the 99%.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
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