Shameful. Just shameful. I don't care how it gets sugar coated, if you claim to be working for the good of humanity (in facebooks case by connecting people together) and then you loophole yourself out of paying taxes, you are morally bankrupt.
If you have a problem with tax "loopholes" then fix the tax law. Don't blame a business for paying only the tax it is legally obligated to pay. Would YOU pay more taxes than you have to?
Most people pay more tax than they need to because they don't have access to devious accountants who create excessive tax-avoidance schemes.
Most of these schemes are neither normal tax planning nor a bit of tax avoidance. They are aggressive tax avoidance that exploit the regulations in weird ways. They're legal, but only because the regulations were malformed (and will get re-made) or because the schemes haven't been tested in courts.
And the way UK tax authorities work is rightly to use courts as a measure of last resort, preferring negotiation instead.
Why not get mad at the politicians who created the tax code?
Would you at least agree with the statement that "Not all legal actions are moral and not all moral actions are legal"?
Morally I believe a business should only pay it's required taxes. Obviously you disagree.
The breadth of complexity and the depth of thought that goes into these corporate structures transcends and notion of "simply doing business"
Gonna quote a post from reddit:
"Facebook does do things honestly & by the book. It just so happens that they have a presence in multiple countries around the world. Due to this Facebook Uk® must pay massive amounts to lease the licenses for software & intellectual property from Facebooks conveniently placed HQ in the lowest tax capitals in the world. Doing so at a price Facebook themselves chooses perhaps based on quarterly earning estimates runs at an amazing cost almost siphoning off all profit. So the resulting entity which owns all the IP / leasing then pays tax in the country it is in on its earnings. Now they may be incorperated in a place with minimal corporation tax & simply keep a post office box there, but I assure you that's entirely the focus of their operations & is absolutely not just in place as a tax avoidance tactic. Now if you dislike this you can absolutely tell them it's unacceptable. I'm sure politicians will be telling them off and using them to get press for .. oh 7-14 days until people move on & forget about it. At which point those same politicians won't change anything which impacts the practices at all."