Ebay

@jen_jen wrote:

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.

Thank you for your take on tax avoidance jen, but truly its not as clear cut as that. There are many companies who pay their taxes without looking for avoidance loopholes and also contribute to charities, its not either or. I would really appreciate a list of companies who avoid tax…..Im sure it would change my shopping habits and yes I do have a share portfolio and it might change my investment decisions too.

@a certain sadness wrote:

I think i will move my window cleaning accounts offshore.

Tax avoidance.. tut tut :D

@a certain sadness wrote:

well if starbucks can do it then im sure certs window solutions can :lol:

:D …. why not