Amazon UK pays corporation tax for first time since 2020 | Hacker News Reader

Amazon UK pays corporation tax for first time since 2020

theguardian.com

47 pointsPaulHoule31 comments

Someone correct me if I'm wrong here, but I believe the reason Amazon doesn't pay tax, and even now is only paying very little corporation tax is because corporation tax is a tax on profits which is something Amazon avoids like the plague. In fact, I believe in the UK Amazon's ecommerce operations operate at a loss and have done for years...

I thought that the UK introduced a digital revenue tax in 2020 to tackle this issue which should tax all revenues of large multinational companies like Amazon at 2%. So Amazon did £27b in sales then I'm surprised to see they're only paying £18.7m in tax...

So am I right in thinking that in addition to this corporation tax bil Amazon is also paying hundreds of millions in digital revenues taxes, and that the The Guardian is just spinning a narrative around the corporation tax Amazon pays? Or is Amazon not paying the new digital revenue tax somehow?

Good! Amazon is a multi-trillion dollar organization - they should pay tax.

Yep, we need to start taxing cash flow (at a lower rate than profit) to finally close the loophole of companies "making zero profit" and therefore owing no taxes.

Profit is just a proxy for business activity, it's not handed down from the gods as the correct way to assess tax. Doing billions of dollars of business a year is a pretty good sign you're doing business and can not only afford but ought to be paying tax.

All the HN bros who started businesses selling dollars for 90c clearly hate this take. Businesses right now pay CC companies 1-3% on every transaction to Visa, a small tax on revenue clearly hasn't killed all businesses. I know in your mind "taxes" means "Uncle Sam takes 30%" but when you're taxing a much much bigger number the percent can be lower, and flat.

How is taxing revenue different to VAT?

VAT is a "Value Added Tax". It does not tax revenue but the additional value added to something.

VAT is a tax on only the value added by an entity, not the total flow of cash through an entity.

do you want to kill every company that is an intermediary? do you want to kill every single super market?

cause that's how you kill 50% of the businesses.

I don't think he's thought it through. It would kill more than 50% of businesses.

Besides, the state typically does take a cut of every transaction, in VAT or sales tax. This holds true even in the UK, and it's 20% which is close to the corporate tax rate on profits at 25%.

It takes a cut of every consumer transaction. Businesses don't pay VAT on their materials for the products they sell.

> Besides, the state typically does take a cut of every transaction, in VAT or sales tax.

What are sales taxes? Because VAT is only applied to the final transaction. VAT fraud is probably the most common tax fraud because of its availability for anyone without morality who own a business (or is close to a business owner), as it's easy to write off VAT.

"BREAKING: Visa raises interchange fees by 1%, every business closes."

You get how crazy that sounds, right?

1% when there's 100b of goods and you only make 101b would still kill the business with that argument, transactional fees can be written off so you don't have to pay tax on them.

So you want to kill all low margin businesses?

The idea is to encourage reinvestment. I think we should tax revenue for any company doing share buybacks or dumping it into executive comp.

If they’re reinvesting in the business and front line employees, that should be exempt.

If people want to buy into the whole “a corporations job is to maximize profit” then governments job is to encourage them to be good corporate citizens.

This type of headline is not ok. This needs to be treated like a crime. It's eventually a crime against all tax payers of that country.

It sounds like it was a deduction introduced by the government? I would be interested in seeing what the proposed benefits of the deduction were and if it seems to have worked.

Also curious how many other companies it impacted. I really don't get the scapegoating of Amazon on many stories where they are sometimes not even the largest company involved in the story.

Then it's a crime committed by the government. I personally don't understand people making excuses for this type of behavior.

It doesn't matter if it's Amazon, Google, or the UK government, it is hypocrisy.

Again, I'd want to see data showing what the intent was and if it succeeded at it. I think it is most likely this was a big mistake. But I'm also somewhat concerned that people are yelling about it because a popular villain was highlighted in the headline.

A popular villain is all big businesses. I'm not at all interested in which company highlights this practice, because they're all either doing it or want to do it.

This is a disagreement between two fundamental philosophies, one trusts corporations to do right by the citizens, the other does not.

And if you found this was most beneficial to small businesses?

My disagreement with you is one of wanting more data.

That's not how it ends up happening in practice.

The bigger and richer you are the more access you have to legal resources that can twist and bend the system to your will.

My former socialist home of Sweden has a richer culture of per-capita small business owners than the late-stage capitalist utopia USA.

Take care of your people, fulfill their needs, and they will naturally want to be entrepreneurs. Irregardless of taxes and social fees necessary.

But I'm asking specifically about this law. Surely there is a holistic analysis going over the goals of the changes compared with how they actually executed?

I'm mostly fine assuming it is more abused by the bigger companies. But, I'm also more ok with larger companies benefiting from things, as long as smaller companies also benefit.

Aiding/encouraging business investment is a crime?

We should probably round up every government ever if that's the case.

The Devil is in the details. This appears to be Amazon Warehouse. They don't really create jobs. In fact they destroy more jobs than they create. They killed "the high street shops". Those "high street shops" employed a lot of local services like accountants, lawyers, financial planners etc. spin off jobs. What spin off jobs does Amazon Warehouse create? They don't use local services described above. Robots? Were those Robots made or designed in the UK? If yes, then that's investment. If no, they are just Canibals.

The high street shops (the ones open 9-5, the same time when most people who work, work) were never going to survive by their nature. They were always going to be beaten on availability. If it wasn't Amazon, it'd be the internet, if it wasn't the internet it would be a mail order catalogue, or a multi-department superstore/retail park (often open later, and cheaper to run with more product availability).

This isn't a defence of Amazon, so much an examination of reality. Lots of small shops is very inefficient, and that's why they're gone. Amazon was just the most successful at translating the efficiency gains into profit and growth.

I don't disagree with you about the shops. I'm just stating that Amazon Warehouse killed the retail economy and the spin off jobs it created. Also, you could add that Amazon Warehouse holds more variety of stock (items). The high street shops were never going to be able to compete with that. So its a win in terms of variety of availability but a loss with respect to the local jobs lost and the skills those people possessed.

The other factor is that Amazon is an American based company so the profits go back to the USA. (Well, maybe its Ireland since I think they're registered there but you get my point).

It's amoral but not directly illegal though.

Ridiculous that a company like this is given credits for automation that actually means less employees needed.

Honestly it's a little...complicated

On one end more employees are good for the economy because people have to work and have jobs.

On the other end having less people is good because it means the productivity rised, that's out objective.

The future scares me

I don't fully agree with it, but the argument is that automation increases productivity and creates new higher paid jobs allowing human labour to be used for more useful things than just moving boxes around warehouses.

Agreed. And it would help if that automation/designed was made in the UK.

But they have cannibalized local businesses on the high street.

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