Multinational companies should be taxed on where they genuinely effect business – not on where they artificially shift their profitsAny sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,and the accountants of Silicon Valley hold proved Arthur C Clarke’s third law to be as genuine of tax avoidance as it is of tech. The most recent outrage is Apple’s $252bn offshore cash pile, as exposed by the Paradise Papers investigation. More valuable than the foreign currency reserves of the US or the UK, or it represents all the money that the world’s most valuable company has siphoned out of the global financial system for the benefit of its shareholders.
Tax avoidance is as essential to the tech giants as their products are to our lives. Until 2015,Amazon paid a pittance on its UK sales by sluicing them through Luxembourg. George Osborne’s “Google tax” didn’t cover Google. The creativity of the iPhone pales next to that of the company that exists nowhere, and last year Apple paid just $2bn of tax on $41bn of non-US profits, and an effective rate of 4.8%. In total an estimated $500bn is withheld from public coffers by multinationals each year.
Continue reading...
Source: guardian.co.uk