What have they got to hide?
Amazon’s UK sales hit £7bn last year, but it will only reveal it paid £7m in tax from its biggest UK arm.. and then got a £1.3m rebate
AMAZON has refused to reveal how much it paid in total UK tax last year after it emerged it actually got a rebate of £1.3million.
The online giant racked up sales of £7billion from UK customers last year but has only made public details of what it paid on its biggest UK arm, accounting for £1.5billion.
Amazon UK Services Limited, which employs 14,000 warehouse and logistics staff, paid just £7million in corporation tax after declaring £24million in profits.
Rules around share handouts to staff meant it was owed tax credits and ended up receiving money from the taxman.
Tax campaigner Professor Richard Murphy, from City, University of London, has criticised the lack of transparency.
He said: “Amazon is still not telling us the truth about its sales, profits and tax due in the UK.
“We can only see the results for its warehousing operation and not what it really makes out of selling to us.
“That’s not good enough in a world where tax transparency is key to customer and investor confidence.
“It’s time for Amazon to adopt the new global approach to tax accounting that’s called country-by-country reporting.
“This would make it report its sales, profits and tax for every country in the world where it operated. Then we’d really know what it was up to and whether it really had some thing to hide.”
Amazon’s soaring share price last week briefly made founder Jeff Bezos the world’s richest man, just ahead of Microsoft’s Bill Gates, with £70billion.
Bezos’ company does not publish the amount of UK tax paid and refused a Mirror request to reveal the amount.
Company filings in the US show it earned a record £7billion in revenue from UK-based customers in 2016.
In the past, most of that money was received in Luxembourg, a well-known tax haven. But it faced accusations of tax avoidance and pledged to stop.
For the past two years, Amazon has sold its products to British shoppers through a new UK branch of the Luxembourg company – and it insists it paid full UK corporation tax on the profits. Three other UK Amazon companies, Amazon Data Services UK Limited, Amazon Web Services UK Limited and Amazon Online UK Limited, earned £131million in turnover in 2016 then paid £1.7million in corporation tax on £7.4million profits. Former Chancellor George Osborne brought in a “Google tax” two years ago on companies artificially moving sales and profits offshore. Amazon’s Luxembourg operations have been under investigation by the European Commission since 2014. If the EC finds it amounts to illegal state aid, it could face a large tax bill. Amazon said: “We pay all taxes required in the UK and every country where we operate. Corporation tax is based on profits, not revenues, and our profits have remained low given retail is a highly competitive, lowmargin business and our continued heavy investment. “We’ve invested over £6.4billion in the UK since 2010, including opening a new head office in London and development centres in Cambridge and London, and created 5,000 permanent jobs in research and development, our head office, customer service and fulfilment centres.”