Tuesday, October 13, 2015



Facebook: Still tax cheats

Facebook has a new tactic for cheating its taxes: pay huge bonuses so you make a "loss":

Staff at Facebook’s UK arm took home an average of more than £210,000 last year in pay and bonuses, while their employer paid just £4,327 in corporation tax.

Facebook made an accounting loss of £28.5m in Britain in 2014, after paying out more than £35m to its 362 staff in a share bonus scheme, according to the unit’s latest published accounts. Operating at a loss meant that Facebook was able to pay less than £5,000 in corporation tax to HM Revenue for the year.


£105 million in revenue, and £35 million of bonuses? Yeah, right. Its so obviously a tax-cheat to engineer a loss that its not even funny.

Of course, those bonuses will have gone overwhelmingly to management, so its boosting inequality at both ends, by raising the undeserved incomes of the rich while stripping the state of the revenue needed to compensate for it.