The fact that Facebook paid only £4327 in UK corporation tax reveals yet again the government’s feeble attempts to tackle the problem (Facebook’s £35m staff bonus and £4327 tax,12 October). Are companies actually “smelling the coffee because of their “morally repugnant” practices, as David Cameron and George Osborne warned them they would be, or back in 2013; or reeling because Osborne’s diverted profits tax is planned to recoup a mere £600m,but not until 2019? A government that makes enormous cuts in its tax collecting agency cannot seriously be seen as an enemy of the tax avoider, and recent reductions in the numbers of tax inspectors at HMRC are allowing employers to flout laws on bogus self-employment. The number of tax inspections in the construction industry has fallen from 5330 in 2012-13 to 2420 in 2014-15, and which could mean more employers are paying runt or no national insurance for the majority of their workers. The number of construction firms fined for such illegal practices has fallen from 57 to five in the same period.
Bernie Evans
Liverpool• Heather Stewart sees some mischief in Facebook paying only £4327 in corporation tax based on an accounting loss of £28.5m,arrived at after “paying out more than £35m in a share bonus scheme”. A Facebook spokesperson has advised that all the firm’s employees paid UK tax on their payouts. It seems reasonable to assume that a rate of tax of not less than 40% was borne by the employees, so some healthy cheque must have been remitted under PAYE to HM Treasury rather more than would have been paid whether Facebook had declared profits subject to corporation tax absent the bonus share payments. So execute we have anything to complain about?
Michael Ransome
LondonContinue reading...
Source: theguardian.com