I was dumbfounded when I saw this article and I did a bit of googling and found out that it is a bloody disgrace, when you think about the bloody profits these companies are making, and how much we the poor people suffer. Here I give you little bits of the aricle. For the full article click the heading.
A massive 220 firms, almost one third of Britain’s largest 700 companies, including Cadbury, Standard Chartered Bank and British American Tobacco, paid no Corporation Tax in 2006-2007.
In addition, a recent report from parliament’s Public Accounts Committee reveals that a further 210 firms paid less than £10 million each. Just 50 firms (7 percent) paid 67 percent of the total. These firms came from 3 of the 17 industry sectors: banking, oil and gas, and insurance.
Small and medium-sized businesses paid nearly half of all Corporation Tax. Not only did large corporations pay just 56 percent of all Corporation Tax, but they paid £0.5 billion less in real terms than in the previous year.
Corporation Tax from large firms raised just £23.8 billion in 2006-2007. Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) spends just £28 million in collecting tax from big business.
The Missing Billions: The UK Tax Gap, a report prepared by Richard Murphy of Tax Research for the Trades Union Council (TUC) in February 2008, examines the accounts of the 50 largest companies, and calculates the tax lost to the government from tax avoidance by the very wealthy at £25 billion annually. This comprises £13 billion from tax avoidance by individuals and £12 billion a year from the 700 largest corporations—and the figure is rising.
To get some sense of perspective of what all this means, the amount lost due to tax planning by those earning more than £100,000 a year would increase child tax credits by enough to halve child poverty. Recovering just under half the total amount lost due to tax avoidance would be enough to increase the state pension by 20 percent, or reduce the basic rate of income tax by 3p in the pound or build another 50 hospitals.
Unpaid tax by the rich and major corporations costs every British worker at least £1,000 a year.
Corporate refusal to pay tax is not just a British but a universal phenomenon. A report by Christian Aid, Death and Taxes: The True Cost of Tax Dodging, published earlier this year, argues that illegal tax evasion by companies is depriving the world poorest countries of US$160 billion a year. The sums lost globally due to tax evasion, which is illegal, are approximately equal to nearly one and a half times the amount of foreign aid given to poor countries. Adding in tax avoidance, which is entirely legal, this would be several times greater than all foreign aid.
The money lost due to illegal tax evasion could save the lives of 350,000 children, 250,000 infants, every year. Christian Aid Director Daleep Mukarji said that “illegal, trade related tax evasion alone will be responsible for the deaths of some 5.6 million children under the age of five between 2000 and 2015.”
The Missing Billions The UK Tax Gap
Death and taxes: the true toll of tax dodging
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