The Largest Corporations Don't Pay Tax - Yet Small Businesses & Individuals Are Getting Hammered!

As tax rises and increasingly aggressive tax regimes are hurting small businesses and individuals the largest corporations are paying little or no tax into the system. I don't believe in tax as I know what a scam it is.

I am non domiciled for tax purposes. This is not illegal and a totally acceptable approach to the issue of tax. I also see it as an act of protest as I do not wish to engage with the scam that is income tax and the misery it facilitates.

In principle I don't have a problem with a business or individual legitimately avoiding tax. However the blatant discrepancy between the way the tax authorities treat individuals and how they treat the largest corporations shows us the nature of financial corruption.

Most people are forced to pay tax yet the most profitable companies are apparently exempt!

In this post I will focus on companies in the UK during 2017 but this corruption is to be found all over the world. Here are just a few examples of large corporations avoiding tax:

Cafe Nero

Cafe Nero which sells coffee in the UK posted sales of £274 million but claimed to be making a loss of £24.2 million. This resulted in Cafe Nero paying a corporate tax of £0! Part of their excuse for being able to continue their natural operations while making enormous losses is the repayment of loans.

Loading up on loans is a common method for corporations to avoid paying tax. The real mechanisms of these loans are often murky and the true nature of who is being paid back for these loans is shrouded in secrecy. My intuition is that there is criminal activity going on the background.

In this case as usual the corporation wins and the people loose! 😢

Apple

With over a billion pounds in annual sales and a declared profit of £106 million apple paid just £12.9 million in tax. The corporate tax rate was supposed to be 20%. Apple is paying far less than this but declares that it pays everything it should.

When apple products are so expensive there is no reason that apple should not be paying more tax!

McDonalds

McDonalds claimed to have made UK sales of £1.53 billion with profits of £270 million and paid a grand total of £56 million in corporate tax. This is one of the largest in this list but still falls far short of the legally required 20%. The mechanisms McDonalds uses to reduce their tax are fairly standard for these large multinational corporations.

In the UK McDonalds is estimated to send a third of its profits to their holding company in Luxembourg. In the Grand Duchy McDonalds pays a corporate tax of just 0.7%!

The UK lost millions and millions of pounds in lost potential tax revenue from McDonalds. Rightly so there has been a backlash against McDonalds because of this. McDonalds is now planning to reorganize their tax affairs to pay more corporate tax in the UK. I think this is just a smoke screen to pacify their UK customers. It will be interesting to investigate the true mechanisms of this new tax structure.

What we know for sure is that they McDonald's will use every trick at its disposal to minimize their corporate tax!

GAP

Added to endless allegations of using sweatshops the GAP is one of the worst offenders in this list. They claimed UK sales of £426 and a profit of: £163 million loss! Their grand total of corporate tax in the UK was £0 and in fact received £110,700 in credit!

What? That sounds insane and it is. The complex mechanisms that GAP is using to avoid all corporate tax even gets them a refund from the government. This is a sick joke and needs to be stopped immediately.

Vodafone

This global telecommunications giant makes global profits of billions of pounds every year yet has paid little or no corporate tax in the UK for years. Vodafone claims to have made UK sales of £6.7 billion but made a loss of £486 million! The total corporate tax paid by Vodafone is £0!

Vodafone has over 500 High Street stores and more than 18 million customers in the UK. They have billions of sales yet don't pay any corporate tax. How is this possible?

The mechanism for this scam is that Vodafone paid huge amounts to the UK government to get their 3G licenses. They were then allowed to offset this money against future tax bills. This is how Vodafone, a profitable FTSE 100 corporation gets away with paying no corporate tax in the UK.

What a joke!

What Does This Tell Us?

The pattern here is very clear. If you are a big corporation there are myriad ways for you to avoid paying your fair share of tax. If you are a small business or an individual then the government will come after you for every pound of tax they can get. If you don't have money they will always happily be paid in blood!

This cosy relationship between the big corporations and the tax authorities is unfair and reeks of corruption. Why aren't are politicians doing something about this? The answer is that they are owned by the same people who own these corporations.

This difference in tax liability for the big corporations and individuals shows us very clearly how the overarching structure of corruption works. Layers within layers of corruption are shielding the real owners of these corporations. They are really owned by the same people and these people also own our politicians!

I advise that everyone consider their tax position. I don't think you should break the law and do something that could affect your liberty but if tax avoidance is good enough for the largest corporations on our planet then it is good enough for you too! 😉

---

Image sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.

---

Jockey loves you All & Plants as Medicine! 😉
Jockey votes 4: @teamsteem, @ausbitbank, @aggroed, @timcliff, @drakos.

---