This Issue Is Very Taxing

Bazile | 15:42 Thu 06th Dec 2012 | News

25 Answers

Well that's good of them

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-20624857

//John Whiting, director at the Chartered Institute of Taxation, told the BBC that Starbucks was trying to protect its image.//

//"I mean, you can say Starbucks depends on its coffee....but a real key thing they depend on, is what people think about them, the trust. Do they like the image they portray?" //

I wonder if Amazon and Google are also now be considering if they like the image they portray .

It never used to happen in my day....

It never happened a 'YEAR' ago.

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LazyGun

I am no expert in tax or tax regulation, and I make no pretence otherwise.And there is always the law of unintended consequences when you start trying to solve or change a complex issue.

But the fundamental point in all of this is that there is moral, ethical, legal and practical reasons why companies should contribute towards the governance of the specific territory that sales of their products or services have been generated in.

It is perfectly true there are British registered multinationals, but I have no doubt that they will have in place measures to avoid tax.

And we should not lose sight of the tax-collecting duties of companies, who will contribute to the exchequer via PAYE, NI, Corporate Pension contributions etc.But whilst we levy corporation tax on net profits, it leaves the system wide open to attempts to minimise this, and we are left with the unedifying spectacle of national governments competing in a race to the bottom in an effort to attract corporations- who will be contributing less and less.

I think the idea of calculating the corporations contribution to the public purse based upon profit is always going to be complicated and open to abuse, and it would be far simpler to associate corporation tax to sales of products and services to a specific territory.