The six largest US tech companies are being accused of inflating the amount of taxes they paid over the past decade by $96 billion. The study, cited by The Guardian, claims that Amazon, Facebook, Alphabet, Netflix, Apple and Microsoft paid less tax on profits than indicated in their annual reports.
At issue is a paper by the British Fair Tax Foundation. The organization, which advocates for companies to pay taxes, also found that in the same period, the six technology companies handed over to tax authorities around the world $149 billion less than would have been expected if they had paid the rates set in the countries in which they actually operated.
In total, the six companies effectively paid $219 billion in taxes between 2011 and 2020, which is only 3.6 percent of the more than $6 billion in profits they generated. The researchers allege that these companies shift their income to tax havens in order to pay less tax.
For example, in the period under review, Amazon generated $1.6 trillion in revenue, reported $60.5 billion in profits, and paid $5.9 billion in taxes. The Fair Tax Foundation assures that the tax should have been almost double, at around 10.7 billion. Amazon’s official source assures that the calculations are “misleading”.
Paul Monaghan, head of the Fair Tax Foundation, said that this analysis shows that only “a radical reform of international tax rules will remedy the situation. He gave as an example the proposal of a global tax system that, if put into practice, would end the “transfer of profits to tax havens” for large companies.
