Starbucks have the headlines today across most of the newspapers. Hardly surprising given that it's been revealed they have not paid any UK Tax since 2009 despite running a profitable UK operation (comments and reports in the U.S suggest). Staggeringly, nothing illegal has taken place, just 'clever' (immoral?) accounting practice. Facebook and Amazon are also cited regularly in the articles as other examples but the Starbucks story is huge when they can have 'technically' made a loss, despite evidence of solid profit, and thus pay no tax.
The call for reform and fairness has a new logo methinks!
Businesses (and certain cyclists) need to work from embedded values and ethics, not the self-justifying whine that "well, everyone else is doing it!"
CAPTAIN'S LOG SUPPLEMENTAL: 'Transfer pricing' is a clever scam indeed for companies. You charge yourself (it seems) an inflated price for some of your own services and mark this down as a cost, thus making it profit for the worldwide company BUT, via this sleight of hand, majorly reducing your tax on profit in the country where sales occur. If I've understood it correctly? .... A kind of scenario (if individuals could do this) whereby a writer earns £30k a year but submits a Tax Return where his/her arm has invoiced for working costs of £25k which have been paid. The writer now claim they have only earned £5k and no tax will be owing.
A second (and much much lesser) crime is that their coffee is nasty...
On a side note - I wonder if we're becoming less moral as a society or simply more excited about talking about it? Not figured that out yet.
Interesting question Sarah. Conversely might these scandals lead to greater morality as people consider just because you can do something, it doesn't make it right?
I'm really curious to see if the Starbucks scandal affects their profit (I mean makes their engineered 'loss' worse)