Ebay

just wait for the sh*t to hit the fan…….there’ll be some big shocks out there for some eventually…….you don’t get away with tax evasion forever even if your money is stashed away in a dutch bank

They are not tax dodging, it is not tax evasion, it is tax avoidance – they are using perfectly legal loopholes. As businesses they (Amazon/Starbucks/Ebay/insert company name of your choice) have an obligation to their shareholders to maximise their profits and that includes only paying as much tax as they have to.

If we want them to pay more tax then it’s up to the powers that be to close the loopholes.

No Mrs T, dodging and evasion are illegal, avoidance is legal, quite different.

Ok here’s 2 scenarios:

Scenario 1
You’re a tax payer. A financial expert says to you “hey, what would you say if I could help you cut your tax bill significantly AND it’s perfectly legal!” What are you going to say? “No no no, I couldn’t, my country is in hard times, we all need to pull together and it is only morally right that I pay as much tax as I possible can.” Or would you say “Legal? Are you sure? So I couldn’t get into trouble for this? Tell me more…”

Scenario 2
You come to pensionable age but you’re not concerned about money, after all you’ve invested in your pension for the last 40 years, you should get a nice little lump sum now that will pay off your mortgage, buy a new car, maybe a nice little holiday, and a much larger sum to pay into a pension annuity. But hold on…what’s this? That’s much less than you were expecting! You contact your pension fund manager and they say “Ah yes well, you see a few years back, during the economic crisis when there was a lot of uncertainty on investments, we played safe and invested with the big boys, you know, Tesco, Sainsburys, Amazon, Starbucks, people like that. Your investments were secure at a time when a lot of other people were losing out but you know, those guys went and got a social conscience, decided to pay huge tax bills in every country they operated in when they really didn’t have to so dividends weren’t as big as we expected them to be…so your pension isn’t as big as we expected it to be…still, they got us out of a bit of a hole as a country didn’t they?”

Fact: none of us wants to pay more tax than we absolutely have to, from the smallest individual to the biggest corporation, and we will take opportunities to avoid it wherever we can. In some countries tax avoidance is practically a national pastime.

Fact: most pension funds have significant investments in large corporations. That means that most of us have a stake in at least one of these companies and will be affected if they decide to pay more tax than they legally have to.

As for social conscience, most corporations have trusts or foundations that put money back into the community…it’s one of those tax avoidance things, perfectly legal. Maybe they should stop doing that and just give the money straight to HMRC who will no doubt spend it wisely on something worthy…like another initiative to take benefits away from those that really need them (the majority of claimants) under the guise of weeding out the malingerers (the minority)…or some other worthy effort…but as long as the loopholes are there, people will use them.

@panda12 wrote:

@a certain sadness wrote:

I do think that e bay, amazon and google etc are taking over the world.There is only one bookshop left where i live, i was gutted when borders shut.

You can buy cheaper online no doubt but you cant beat the smell and atmosphere of a real bookshop.

Sorry Panda am drifting off.

I agree with you. I do buy stuff from Amazon but not if there’s a local retailer where I can go.

going back to the book thing…….last five books i have wanted to buy i havent been able to buy in a shop……..whsmith really have lost the plot these days and waterstones seem to want to sell you only books that are ‘trendy’………that being that i have bought the five books from amazon ……..its a shame but shops are being left behind…….wake up!