It would be nice if they were paying tax in the first place
They do have offices in the UK and it's not like they're just playing ping pong there.
What's your definition of "operating in"?
Legally, "operating in" means whatever you claim as your home country. Otherwise, it turns into a morass.
However, tax laws are NP complete. Every time you try to close a loophole you introduce unforseen interactions with other pre-existing laws. How do you think the double Irish got established? Totally legal, and not taking advantage of it would be foolish.
What do you mean the office pays tax? Yes employees do, but it is the nature of that business that headcount is low in proportion to revenues, so this is not a big number. This is an argument against all corporation tax btw, is that what you meant? corporations should pay no tax because they have employees that should pay it?
> To avoid double taxation, it's very difficult to establish how much revenue should be charged to a particular tax jurisdiction.
It really isn't hard to find out where the revenue was, when you buy Facebook advertising you choose who you want it shown to. It wouldn't be very useful if my UK window cleaning service was shown to Indian users. So the service was delivered in the UK. It gets complicated you start using brand licensing deals between your group to move profits around. Or even more obscure, Starbucks UK buys its coffee beans from that famous coffee producing country, Switzerland for an obscene markup. Personally I am in favour of heavy restriction for anything over market value.
> legally, "operating in" means whatever you claim as your home country
'Operating in' does not mean that at all. Operating in is where you are making sales, or have operations. You are operating in at least all of the countries where you have employees. I think you are thinking about 'headquartered in'
Facebook has a UK registered subsidiary making sales in the UK. The UK is a good market for a tech company, low regulation, very low corruption, good broadband and mobile coverage. none of that was free for the UK to install.
The office pays rent, which presumably goes to the property owner (taxed)
> Yes employees do, but it is the nature of that business that headcount is low in proportion to revenues, so this is not a big number.
So corporate income tax should be inversely proportional to how many employees you have?
For example, if you have a large construction company, and you make your workers use teaspoons instead of shovels, you should pay fewer taxes? That sort of logic leads to the depriortization of efficiency and automation.
> It really isn't hard to find out where the revenue was, when you buy Facebook advertising you choose who you want it shown to.
Sure. Maybe you're saying "football fans" if you're selling jerseys (either US or European football).
So the jersey was manufactured in China, sent to the UK, and shipped to Germany. The advertising company is based in the states (like Facebook or Google). Which country should Facebook/Google pay taxes to?
Industrial manufacturing targets interests more then geographic location. For instance, if you're a UK company primarily buying ad space from a US outlet but primarily selling to China, where should the revenue taxes be sent to?
> Operating in is where you are making sales, or have operations.
How does that work? Most large IT/hosting companies have data centers in foreign nations. Do they have to split up revenues based on traffic patterns? (For example, 5% of our traffic goes through London so we have to pay British taxes on 5% of our hosting revenues.)
> Facebook has a UK registered subsidiary making sales in the UK.
The question is not that simple. Who cares where the sales are being made? That completely discounts the costs of R&D.
Germany, where the sale happened. The other countries are transit countries, and the intermediaries are paid accordingly (e.g. shipping & handling fee for the UK company), so their taxes. This is very well defined in international commerce. In the EU, when you ship abroad and you get a review by the tax admin, you have to prove the goods left the country, otherwise you pay the VAT (sales tax). These international rules are very well defined by the WTO and harmonising laws by the EU.
On the other hand, politicians should not blame these companies because they use the loopholes. Legislators allow these to happen, and the legislators job is make better laws that are not allow to e.g. transfer money into or have direct or indirect relationship with tax heavens. It is hard to blame Google and Facebook, when the royals use tax heavens to stash their cash, or Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the EU's EC, made Luxemburg a tax heaven when he was minister of treasury, finances then prime minister of Luxemburg. The fish stinks from the head.
Well, that's not clear. The advertising company "sells" ad space from a server in Jerusalem, but the user logged in from Thailand. Where did the sale occur?
I touched on this earlier. Does Google (for example) have to pay 5% of taxes to London on ad revenue because 1/20 servers are in England? That incentivizes them to just move their data centers, which further advantages them because only large companies can pack up their toys and go home.
If it's mapped to the physical location of the server, most large companies have enough capital to relocate their servers to a tax haven.
If it's the physical location of the user, how do you determine that with a high degree of certainty? All users have to do is use a VPN that's located in St. Martin, and all your efforts will be in vain.
Also, there is also VAT, sales tax, etc etc.
> Legislators allow these to happen, and the legislators job is make better laws that are not allow to e.g. transfer money into or have direct or indirect relationship with tax heavens.
I would argue that it's this dizzying maze of laws that causes these problem, because I have said before, laws, especially tax laws, are an NP complete system.
Legislators have to pass laws to justify their existence. Now they're passing laws to cover up holes in laws either they or other people passed in a non digitally connected age. The solution is not better laws, but fewer laws.
The situation of these large companies is they have a web of shelf companies just to optimise their taxes. E.g. neither Facebook nor Google or Apple does their core business activity and R&D in Ireland or formerly in Luxembourg. They simply extract the profit on arbitrary measures.
In classical companies (manufacturing, automotives, media, etc) when there is a holding company, usually there is a realistic “commission” that the child companies keep on sales revenue, e.g. 40%. This is an extrapolated number to a company level based on what the company would pay to an individual salesman in commission. There are holding companies for intellectual properties in the UK, e.g. ARM or WPP, BAE Systems, Rolls Royce, etc. If you are interested, I'd have a look to their quarterly financial reports to see how they divide the profit among their subsidiaries.
But, we can reverse the question: how less would be the revenue if Facebook or Google would have no office presence in the country? If they can answer this question (and they do when they make their quarterly financial reports), then it is easy to measure how much tax is fair to pay.
> I would argue that it's this dizzying maze of laws that causes these problem
Sure, fewer laws the better. Yet, safe havens for stashing money from questionable sources are individual cases. Their economy is based on extracting money made in other countries and the tourism related to stashing the money. There are plenty of whitepapers with ideas how to resolve this situation, yet nothing happens, because the people who can make it happen, personally are not interested in it.