Well people if you are living in the UK, then know that you are paying more tax than Facebook ever pays. Don’t be angry; it’s nobody’s fault. Read more to understand how it’s even possible.
When you finished calculating your yearly taxes and cursed your government enough, this happens. In the UK, Facebook has paid £4,327 for the year 2014 as the corporation tax and generated £105 million ($161 million) in sales.
This is lesser than an average UK worker who paid about £5,393 tax and earned just £26,500 yearly.
So, how did this happen? Is it possible either? Does Facebook do something illegal to save taxes?
Well, you might be disappointed in knowing that the answer is NO and they didn’t make just the right kind of taxable profit.
Still confused? Let’s know about the details (Thank you BBC for that)
The corporation tax, which we are talking about here, is paid only by companies, not individuals. According to the UK laws, the firms making more than £300,000 a year need to pay 21% tax on the profits they usually make.
In the UK alone, Facebook has made about £105 million ($161 million) in sales.
But, then comes the part where we talk about the technical aspects and loopholes. All the money which a company makes, isn’t a taxable profit, especially when the company spends a considerable portion of their earnings on other sectors.
Out of the total £105 million, Facebook spent more than £35 million on its UK-based staff and gave them share-based bonuses. So, as the BBC describes, before paying the taxes, Facebook made a “pretax” loss of £28.5 million.
Thanks to all these technicalities, Facebook manages to pay less tax than you expend.
Even though everything is legal and well documented, Facebook is attracting some controversies. It is being claimed that the social networking company is draining out its profits from the country with one of the lowest tax rates.
Yes, I’m talking about the Republic of Ireland, where tax rates are about half that of the UK.
In a statement to BBC, a Facebook spokesperson says: “I’m not saying no comment, but there is no further comment to the statement. We are compliant with United Kingdom tax law and all you, entries where we have employees and continue to grow our business activities in the UK.”