There was recently a great deal of fuss and hoopla about Olympic tax exemptions in which it was stated that several of the major corporate sponsors, including McDonalds and Coca-Cola, had agreed to waive their exemptions, earning them a pat on the back, says Simon Sweetman.
It is not clear to me that any such exemptions actually existed in the first place. The London Olympic Games and Paralympic Games Tax Regulations 2010 (a statutory instrument) do provide various exemptions from income tax. All of them are for individuals (particularly performers and other workers associated with the games who are neither resident nor ordinarily resident in the UK). So particularly it exempts Olympic athletes from the normal tax rules applying to performers and athletes appearing in the UK (and the sort of problems that Andre Agassi famously got into). This is not unusual – a similar exemption applied to the Champions League final when it was held in the UK. In the case of the Olympics, at least part of the motive might have been the immense complications of trying to apply the normal rules to all these people as they surged in and out of the country.
I can see no exemptions from corporate taxes here, though in some cases exemptions might apply to certain people working for “partner” organisations. And it would seem that much of the hype about it was just that, with corporations anxious to show how public spirited they are by not taking advantage of exemptions they wouldn’t have got in the first place. One would suspect that transnational corporations really do not need any extra help in the matter of tax avoidance, and that profits made at the Games might appear in a set of accounts almost anywhere where corporate taxes are low.
And now the Daily Mail appears to be backing a campaign to exempt US athletes from income tax on their medals – that is to exempt them from US taxes, not UK taxes that they would not have paid in the first place: and it’s not actually tax on their medals (which would be trivial with a gold medal perhaps worth £150) but prize money paid to them by the US Olympic Committee for winning medals – something which most countries do not do. UK winners do not receive any payment and while Singapore pays more than £500,000 for a gold medal that is not going to break the bank as at this point athletes from Singapore have won precisely one bronze medal.
One might almost suspect that the Mail’s headline Let Olympic heroes keep their gold, say politicians was deliberately intended to confuse (since “Olympic heroes” can surely only mean British Olympic heroes), After all, if they had really been British it would have said “MPs” not “politicians”.
So we have another entirely spurious tax row which once again diverts attention from real scandals.