Back in Feb 13 I wrote a series of articles along the theme – Doing Good is Good for Business. I received a large and wholly supportive postbag as a result.
Today we have seen two examples of companies accused of not ‘doing good’ – indeed one of ‘doing evil’ – although in neither case does it seem to have done much harm to their thriving businesses. One example was Amazon which was found to have paid £3.2m tax on UK revenues of £4.26b and, to add insult to injury, had received £2.5m in Scottish grants! The other was Google where Matt Brittin was hauled back before the Public Accounts Committee and accused of misleading Parliament in his earlier testimony. The Google case hinges around whether the UK ‘sells’ or just ‘promotes’ their services. I’m not lawyer, but listening to Brittin’s laboured responses, the term‘If it swims like a duck, if it quacks like a duck, it probably….’ came to mind.
Although I’m sure that almost every HotViews reader is also a Google and Amazon user too, we just must accept that everything we now ‘consume’ via them used to go through a UK-HQed (and therefore UK-taxpaying) entity. Be it classified ads in a local paper or the local record shop. We freely chose to use Amazon and Google but, bluntly, I didn’t freely choose for them to have a significant tax advantage over their UK-based competitors.
Clearly we need to change the tax laws. Whether this can be done by the UK alone or whether it requires global action is unclear. But is it totally unfair to ask companies to ‘do the right thing?” As I have said in previous articles I have been offered all manner of tax saving schemes but have freely chosen to avoid them. I owe a great deal to the UK and, as long as taxes are ‘fair and reasonable’, I don’t have an issue in paying them. UK corporation taxes are now ‘fair and reasonable’ and I can’t see why companies should not pay their fair share.
Anyway, Doing Good is Good for Business too!