Tax avoidance certainly isn't *illegal*, but it is sometimes *immoral*,
such as when a multinational pretends that it is conducting its business in
a low-tax country while actually making most of its profits elsewhere. It
robs the latter countries of revenue that its citizens are paying for.
Companies who do that may be within their *legal *rights, but clearly are
not within any definition of *moral *rights.
The problem with Katie's suggested solution is that it simply does not
work. Governments have no track record at all of being able to fix these
sort of problems.
What does work is consumer pressure and the consequences of bad publicity
for companies who cheat us of their tax contributions. Every little bit of
pressure helps, so let's keep on crowd-sourcing our concerns - although I
do agree that we've probably exhausted this thread as a channel for these
issues.
--
Doug
On 1 December 2013 16:08, Katie Chan <ktc(a)ktchan.info> wrote:
On 01/12/2013 13:00, fabian(a)unpopular.org.uk wrote:
The issue which was raised was the reputation of
the charity, not the cost
of the vouchers.
Bear in mind that WMF received £2M from Google in 2010 which falls within
the period covered by the Public Accounts Committee report on Google
published this summer:
http://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/
committees-a-z/commons-select/public-accounts-committee/
news/tax-avoidance-google/
“The company’s highly contrived tax arrangement has no purpose other than
to enable the company to avoid UK corporation tax.
“Google’s reputation has been damaged by these revelations of aggressive
tax avoidance. That damage will not be repaired until the company arranges
to pay its fair share of tax in the country where it earns the profits
from the business it conducts."
So, the Wikimedia movement in general, through this donation to the WMF
can be seen as benefiting from Tax Avoidance.
Tax avoidance isn't illegal. Companies and people are well within its
rights to minimise their tax liability to the extent the law let them.
If you believe certain practise is unacceptable, then contact your MP and
or petition the government to change the law to make it illegal (or run for
parliament etc).
--
Katie Chan
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