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A comment on EU lost up to €5.4B in tax revenues from Google, Facebook: report. Parent comment

Re:EU lost up to €5.4B in tax revenues from Google, Facebook... by qxmat on Thursday September 14, 2017 @03:08AM (#15245567)
Large tech companies employ hollywood accounting techniques to continually reinvest surplus revenue. In doing so they rarely post any significant profit, depriving the taxmax of corporation tax.

This 'reinvestment' is used to compete and drive profitable competitors out of business. This is an unfair practice. The result - no profitable companies, smaller taxable base and nothing for the taxman to collect.

The bigger the juggernaut, the more influence they have on the taxman ("but we're contributing to pay/income/property taxes - surely you don't want us to relocate abroad"). Large multinationals use their corrupting influence to strike sweetheart deals and use these deal-made tax savings to abuse the market even more.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:EU lost up to €5.4B in tax revenues from Google, Facebook... by mjevans on Thursday September 14, 2017 @03:34AM (#15245689)
It doesn't just have to be tech companies, but the interesting thing is the abuse of 'intellectual property' (a thing which governments literally imagined in to existence) being used to transfer around wealth through agreements that, without it, wouldn't hold any water.
[ Parent | on HN ]