Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
No they don't. They practice tax AVOIDANCE - as does every large company. Tax AVOIDANCE (paying the minimum amount of tax that the law permits) is entirely different to tax EVASION, which is the illegal non-payment of taxes.
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That's correct. But the border where tax avoidance turns into tax evasion isn't as clear-cut as one might think; what a company thinks might just be very clever accounting practices, a prosecutor might think constitutes tax evasion.
The government is free to sue, you might say, and you're right, but it usually doesn't because more often than not that would mean cutting off its own arm to save its hand (see the US treatment of illegal behaviour by HSBC; by claiming the bank is too important and would have to be closed down if prosecuted, they say they "had to let it get away"). And more often than not, closing a tax loophole isn't possible at all, because said loophole only exists because a multinational like Amazon bases its headquaters in another country, thereby avoiding local jurisdiction outright (Amazon didn't own distribution centers in US states where it would have to pay sales tax for a very long time, to give an example for the US alone).
Playing out tax laws of various countries against each other basically guarantees a multinational that it can get away with an amount of tax avoidance that simply was never the intention of any single government. Your solution seems to be to do nothing or change the whole system in each and every country in sync. That's not a solution at all.
And so when the "tax loopholes" persist because lobbying (to the tune of millions) goes a step beyond legal (and don't tell me this isn't happening constantly) and because it just isn't feasible to change the tax codes in dozens of countries in sync, that means that governments have to use other means to protect the local economy from foreign multinationals. And that's what the French government is trying to do here (a bit clumsily); the same thing that the US government does all the time (punituve tarriffs on certain goods from Asia, for example).
So please spare us the righteous indignation. In an imperfect world where it's sometimes not possible to right a perceived wrong, you have to make do with what you can actually achieve.
Now you can stand on your high horse and proclaim that Amazon isn't doing anything that every tax payer isn't doing, too; or you could honestly admit that the system is broken and broken in ways that are beyond (easy) repair. And since it's the government perogative to pass new laws, why shouldn't the French do exactly that? If Amazon is free to do anything legal in their power to avoid paying taxes, shouldn't, by the same logic, the government be allowed to do everything in its power to collect taxes?
If Amazon doesn't like it, it is, of course free to leave the French market. And if the French people don't like it, they're free to elect a different government (as they have done in the past).
So, it's all fine, isn't it?