It is in my moral code - Availing yourself of a market and using the facilities and workforce of the UK, without chipping in your fair share (as decided by the people of that country). Sounds immoral to me.
Someone out there has a moral code that encourages stoning women to death. Doesn't mean that has got anything to do with anything being as it is a vague and meaningless concept that doesn't inform governance.
> Availing yourself of a market
By which you mean acting as a VAT collection body and sending that money to the treasury for transactions within that market that occured under your business.
> the facilities and workforce of the UK
Would you rather the roads were empty because the people of the UK had no jobs?
There are ways to address this issue as discussed endlessly. But the last thing this is is immoral. It may not be just nor fair, but those do no interact with the morality of a benign government and their laws and regulations. It doesn't help the argument but it is rhetoric that is being thrown around that as much as anything hinders progress on this issue
I didn't claim morality was objective, no need to behave as if I did.
By which you mean acting as a VAT collection body...
What are you trying to say here? That because they collect VAT that's ok and they should be exempt from other taxes?
Would you rather the roads were empty because the people of the UK had no jobs?
False dichotomy. It's not the ability to move profits abroad that keeps people employed in the UK, arguably it sucks money out of the country and is a net loss to our economy.
> it is fundamentally immoral to operate like that.
Sounds pretty objectively-stated to me.
Count me in the camp that disagrees with you. Normal people do all sorts of perfectly legal tricks to pay less income tax. They're not cheating; they're just paying the minimum they're legally required to pay. Same deal for business. Whatever they can get away with without breaking any laws is the minimum requirement. Paying extra tax out of some patriotic duty is illogical, as is not taking advantage of the perfectly-legal loopholes found.
It is not up to the businesses to pay more tax than the current legal framework requires; it's up to lawmakers to amend the tax code so that 'undesirable' loopholes are closed.
Businesses act to maximize profits. There is nothing immoral about this.
I really disagree with this worldview.
When business dump toxic byproducts into water supplies, in places where nobody has yet legislated against that, is it not immoral?
I agree it's up to the lawmakers to change things, by the way, but I don't agree that it's always the right thing to do for companies to walk as close to the line of illegal behaviour as it's possible to get, just to maximise profit.
The morality of it is irrelevant because it is deemed to be an infraction of a law in most places
It's quite clear what the intent of the tax laws is, and it's quite clear that announcing a loss to the tax office but a massive profit to your investors is at the very least duplicitous.
If it was then what they are doing would be illegal
Interesting worldview there...
That most ordinary people would agree that this is the right approach tells volumes about the society we live in.