Sunday, December 23, 2012

Repeat After Me: Facebook Is Not Avoiding Tax In The UK

We have yet another of these rather ignorant claims that one of the big internet companies is avoiding tax in the UK. This time it’s alleged to be Facebook: and the allegation is nonsense. It is most certainly true that Facebook doesn’t pay much corporation tax in the UK. But this is not because of tax avoidance: it’s because Facebook doesn’t do much trade in the UK. And this is not tax avoidance, this is how the tax system is supposed to work, was designed to work.

This doesn’t seem to stop newspapers getting it wrong though:

FACEBOOK funnelled 440m into a tax haven last year in an effort to sidestep the tax authorities in Britain and other big markets.

The move enabled the social networking giant to pay a mere 2.9m of corporation tax on more than 800m of overseas profits in 2011, according to accounts for its Irish subsidiary. In Britain it paid less than 240,000.

Keep reading…

Read also:

Facebook paid 2.9m tax on 840m profits made outside US, figures show (The Guardian)

Facebook Funneled Nearly Half A Billion Pounds Into The Cayman Islands Last … (Business Insider)

Don't like! Facebook paid just 2.9m corporation tax on 800m profit made … (Daily Mail)

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