Different with Starbucks, i suppose, but its harder to do with a company like Google or other internet companies where the source of revenue (as far as a taxable location) goes is a pretty sticky issue.

My catchall solution for non-internet companies would be complete abolition of corporate income tax in lieu of a VAT (or if VAT already exists along with corporate income, killing the latter and hiking the former to compensate), essentially moving everyone to a "pay to play" model; you want to play in a certain market, you have to give over the tax revenue. So no more subsidiary shell games or outsourcing of corporate headquarters, and the loss of the corporate income tax means that the cost doesn't get passed onto consumers as such (the burden on the company remaining roughly the same)

Makes sense to me, anyway. Why should the companies that follow the rules be "punished" by having to pay their fair share while the ones playing funny little games get off with less?

Playing devils advocate here but surely there is nothing wrong with only paying the tax you are legally required to pay. People use ISAs, non taxable job perks, charitable donations etc to avoid paying tax without negative stigma. How would shareholders react to management not minimising its tax burden
The fault lies with governments for allowing these loopholes to exist in the first place and last as long as they have.

Personally I've been avoiding Starbucks since all this came to light. Google is too integrated into my life to avoid :'(

"its investment in various European countries helps their economies. In the U.K., “we also employ over 2,000 people, help hundreds of thousands of businesses to grow online, and invest millions supporting new tech businesses in East London,” the Mountain View, California-based company said in a statement."

"and in the same time we killed thousands of companies in that country because they can't compete against us with them paying 10x as much tax as we do and the hundred of millions we would normally pay tax in this country are not in this country anymore which surley helps this country so much."

and i don't even want to know how many online stores or retailer went broke in germany because of amazon and amazon's advantage. "oh look it's 5% cheaper on amazon i will buy it there, every other retailer won't sell anything anymore"

but yeah, laws have to get changed or whatever is possible.

This is the natural result of progressive taxation with deductions. It allows organizations and individuals huge leverage in gaming the system.

This is why I favor the FairTax and flat tax systems with no corporate taxes. Shift the burden onto people, not businesses. The reason, then, is that they'd have no need for tax havens, as there'd be no way to secretly reduce your tax rate.

Some msft fan is butthurt over google...

Moderated,

-Mr Khan

i completely agree with you kowenicki. while my company isn't listed above i'm ashamed to say we do the same practices.

i'm not sure a "global government" is exactly needed there certainly needs to be more cross-country collaboration to eliminate these loopholes larger corporations are able to exploit.

ahh dallas you are late

The issue being that the loopholes benefit certain countries. Tiny little enclaves that would hardly make any money (outside of tourism) otherwise get to attract all kinds of business.

Then you just end up with trade war of some sort.

well, the benefits of the smaller countries would be different.  minimum wages for instance so their people stop being exploited.

No.