Summary

Tax avoidance has been a major menace in many governments worldwide. Therefore, this article will focus on tax avoidance by multinationals and the tax loopholes that motivate this unfair practice among nations. Companies such as Starbucks, HSBC, Google, Barclays bank and Amazon have been accused on more than one occasion of corporate tax avoidance. How do they go about this and get away with it? Do governments favor big corporations at the expense of domestic small and mid-level companies? At the end of this article, it will be clear and evident that indeed tax avoidance is morally wrong unless monitored under stringent government rules and regulations. In essence, this article focuses on the extent to which tax avoidance limits government expenditure (thus government spending) and the extent to which this problem affects the economy and society as a whole.

The Moral violation of Tax Avoidance in a nutshell

In these hard economic times of recessions and escalating unemployment in Europe and America, governments are implementing budget cuts in an effort to cope with national debts and the aftereffects of this global economic pandemic as a whole. Inflation reports have become the business norm of major mainstream media houses like CNN and BBC.

It has become almost impossible to hear of a rise in employment levels or deflation in prices. What this means in essence is that as governments implement budget cuts, they also result to internal borrowing measures such as increasing taxes on goods and services in their respective local markets. At the end of the day, the ordinary hard-working citizen is left to grapple with how to balance an increasingly insufficient paycheck with ever-increasing prices of goods and services.

It is because of this reason that tax avoidance shifts the tax burden from the evasive and tricky corporation to the honest middle and low income earning citizen. This is clearly a sign of tax bias practiced in broad daylight. The sad bit about this is that many governments don’t have stringent measures to punish such big ‘untouchables’. Is it that someone within is pulling the strings to ensure that justice isn’t upheld? Are these mysterious government entities ‘sufficiently compensated’ by tax avoiding multi-national corporations for a ‘job well done’?

Because the interesting bit about tax avoidance is that it doesn’t amount to tax evasion. For instance, in 2011, the Google firm in the UK had amassed a whooping 395 million pound turnover. But as it turns out, the United Kingdom treasury only received 6 million pounds; an astoundingly tiny fraction of the profits. Similarly, Amazon had sales of 3.35 billion in the same year but contributed a mere 1.8 million pounds to the British Treasury .

As absurd as these two randomly picked incidences sound, what these companies did was legal. Essentially, no laws were broken despite the moral absurdity of such obvious, draconian and potentially ‘tax evasive’ actions. Why aren’t there any laws to address such malice? Does it mean that someone is not doing his job and is being paid by these multinationals to keep quiet?