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Family feud?
I do hope that the relatives of Ms Hodge, who are currently running a tax efficient family business, are grateful for her input.
I wonder...
....if Danny Alexander could be convinced that maybe half the £77M might be better spent asking AccWeb to do the work in finding and rectifying the tax avoidance, I'm not sure if HMRC are up to it?
It would be a great way for me to work my way to retirement and I'd feel good that, at last, after all these years I had done something to help the country.
OTS
Why doesn't Osborne put a few million in the direction of the OTS and let them get on with what they were tasked.
Simples!
Whatever tax they
agree to pay will only come from thier employees. Less earnings for emplyees less tax take to make up the bit of corp tax they will have to pay.
HMRC then turn round and say "didn't we do a good job" Utter shambles.
Lest we forget...
Margaret Hodge MP, the honourable member for Stemcor should not forget family trusts, such as the one where the profits from tax avoidance by Stemcor (the company set-up by her late father) are distributed.
Although I suspect she is following the old maxim "Do as I say, not as I do" in her hypocritical moral tirade.
Where does the immorality begin?
I work from home, so I take my Home as Office allowance & reduce my CT. Admitedly, in some respects it costs me more to work here but I save in other ways. However, I deliberately chose this set-up in tax planning. This is just about the thinnest end of the wedge on Tax Avoidance I can think of. Is this immoral? I don't think so. So where does the immorality start?
Government sets the rules on what constitutes Tax Evasion. EVASION is where the immorality starts in my opinion. So if the Government think that Companies and individuals are acting immorally but legally, surely they should be blaming themselves as to the poor quality of legislation they have passed?
Or have I lost the plot, thinking that politicians would be prepared to say Mea Culpa and spend that £77m on plugging the loop-holes?
Can we possibly address the issues?
I love the right wing thing of let's ignore the ball and play the man (woman in this case). As long as anyone in the Labour party and their extended family are not whiter than white, corporations should not have to pay tax. Am I understanding you correctly, Frustrated and Thorny Issues?
Not really...
I love the right wing thing of let's ignore the ball and play the man (woman in this case). As long as anyone in the Labour party and their extended family are not whiter than white, corporations should not have to pay tax. Am I understanding you correctly, Frustrated and Thorny Issues?
I was more interested in "playing the ball" of this being a typical example of political hypocrisy.
Amazon, Google, Starbucks AND Stemcor are all following the letter of UK tax law and correctly applying the terms of international tax treaties determined by UK governments past and present and enforced by HMRC.
Any avoidance measures taken by those companies (and many others) to reduce their tax bills without breaking the law are understandable as those companies have a responsibility to obey the tax law and also for many US companies a fiduciary duty to maximize returns to investors in so doing.
The recent moral outrage that it is easier for an international company to avoid tax than a purely domestic company (through transfer pricing and other games), should be firmly placed back in the lap of the politicians.
They and their civil service minions have written the many thousands of pages of the UK tax code and agreed and signed the EU Single Market treaties which these companies are following.
The reason I find the MP for Stemcor's moral outrage distasteful is that she and her parliamentary colleagues are both the cause of this problem and its only real solution.
They are too lazy and gutless to strip down the UK tax code to a reasonable, workable and irreducible minimum, which would substantially reduce UK tax avoidance.
They are too cowardly to face down the EU & European Courts to stop transfer pricing and similar scams which enable this avoidance.
If MP's had any ethical substance at all then they would be acting, not egotistical grandstanding.
You couldn't make it up...
...the execrable Hodge, principal previous claim to fame of covering up child abuse on her watch, hypocritically wants international businesses to pay more tax but not her own one.
Plus Starbucks has franchisees in the UK, presumably these are paying the same rates for IP and coffee etc. as the connected parties thus any TP enquiry would be pointless. Other businesses are just setting up as the EU permits and has permitted for a long period of time.
Inevitable consequence = more bully boy HMRC tactics on small businesses, closing some perfectly compliant ones down. Why would anyone set up a small business in the UK at the moment? I wouldn't.
The LibCon imbeciles really are continuing Gordon Brown's scorched earth policy towards the UK economy.