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EU Unveils Plan To Force Facebook, Google and Amazon To Pay Their Fair Share of Tax (independent.co.uk)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Independent: The European Commission is bringing forward plans to make major multinationals such as Google, Amazon and Facebook disclose exactly where and how much tax they pay across the continent. The plan was expected to include rules requiring businesses earning more than 600 million euros a year (nearly $700 USD) to open up their tax affairs to public scrutiny, revealing their profits and accounts in every country in which they operate within the EU. Since the Panama Papers, a new clause has reportedly been added to require the companies to say how much money they make in so-called "tax havens." A final, more general statement would reveal profits in the rest of the world, treated as a single item. The plans will be presented by Britain's EU Commissioner, Lord Hill, who told the BBC: "This is a carefully thought through but ambitious proposal for more transparency on tax. While our proposal on [country-by-country reporting] is not of course focused principally on the response to the Panama Papers, there is an important connection between our continuing work on tax transparency and tax havens that we are building into the proposal."
Irrelevant. Do you really feel that multinationals (who are the main drivers of oligopolization in every market they participate in; and whose reach and power worldwide has increased enormously since the Thatcher/Reagan revolution) should be allowed to keep their competitive advantage over smaller companies, just because they can afford to hire the "best" lawyers and bookkeepers? Given that SMEs have to pay, and citizens (whose income comes from something other than cap gains, which is by and large not meaningfully taxed) I see no reason why big companies should be able to avoid it. The playing field is uneven enough as it is.
Punish the wealth creators, and they'll stop creating wealth.
Considering all the wealth they create ends up in their own pockets, I'd say it's a fair deal.
Eat the rich.
I am not sure this is about the EU simply getting more money. The general population has had a gutful of large corporations avoiding tax that they themselves can't avoid paying, this in turn is allowing minor parties that speak out against this to bleed support from major political parties, they know if they don't do something soon it isn't the money they have to worry about, it is there jobs.
The whole problem is they are not creating wealth, at least not in the countries they are siphoning money away from, they are doing the opposite. This isn't about punishing them, it is about creating a level playing field where just because you are a multinational that can move HQ into a tax haven that you can't gain a competitive advantage on local companies that have to pay their taxes.
This isn't just a money grab, it's about curtailing extreme abuse of the system. These companies benefit from the services paid for by taxation (infrastructure, education, healthcare, legal system etc.) but contribute almost nothing back. Certainly nothing like what the law intended.
Essentially it's a bugfix to stop people abusing a flaw in the system, like a developer would ship for an MMO if players discovered a way to harvest vast amounts of gold in a way that was never intended.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Punish the wealth creators, and they'll stop creating wealth.
Nonsens. Who do you think are the real wealth creators? The fat cats that sit at the top, skimming the cream off the labour of others without much effort? Or the people who put in a real day's work, whether they are called engineers, hi-tech entrepreneurs, farmers or manual labourers? All of these groups of wealth creators will keep working, because they have to, whether they pay taxes or not; if they don't, they can't feed their families. If your only contribution to society consist in siphoning un-earned money into your own wallet, then you are nothing more than a parasite, and the rest of us would be better off without you.