Chapter 975 The End of Endurance
In fact, England has invested a lot in network infrastructure. Prior to this, they launched the "Broadband Promotion Plan" and used the funds returned from the BFT fund to invest in the construction of broadband networks.
When Standard Chartered Bank acquired Northrock Bank, it also assumed its 25 billion pounds of debt that was rescued by the British government.
At that time, in accordance with the agreement between Barron and the British government to assume these debts, the British government once again invested 25 billion pounds into the British Fortune Era (BFT) fund established by Barron. Through the investment, he would return a total of 500 million pounds to the British government. billion pounds and corresponding interest.
Prior to this, the BFT Fund has returned 25% of the funds and corresponding interest to the British government, totaling more than 13.5 billion pounds. These funds will be used to invest in plans to promote British broadband infrastructure within five years.
It is also because of this that the current network conditions in England have greatly improved compared to those in the original time and space.
However, the British government found that Internet giants such as Google, Yahoo, and Amazon used the most domestic network bandwidth, but they did not get back much tax money from these Internet giants.
These Internet giants often choose some tax havens to establish branches under "active tax optimization" to reduce the taxes they pay in overseas markets.
According to surveys, Internet giants such as Google, Yahoo, and Amazon have been enjoying single-digit effective tax rates on their non-U.S. profits, which is about a quarter of the average tax rate in their overseas markets.
Generally speaking, "taxation comes from the people and is used for the people." This is applicable to most individuals and companies. As long as you engage in economic activities in this country or region, you must pay taxes to this country or region. The government pays taxes, and since most economic activity is visible or measurable, taxes are paid.
Some taxes are something that ordinary people can personally experience, such as the personal income tax paid when they get their salary every month; some taxes are not personally felt by ordinary people, such as the consumption tax when buying things, the tax paid by enterprises to the government VAT etc…
But for some special companies, it may not be so easy to tax them. The most obvious one in this regard is undoubtedly Internet companies.
Internet companies, especially large Internet giants like Google, Yahoo, and Amazon, rely on the Internet, a global super infrastructure, to provide their services to people all over the world, but their income is not everywhere. Paying taxes...
This is because it is very likely that people in the UK have viewed a lot of ads on Google, which has brought a lot of revenue to Google, but in fact the advertisers may not be in the UK, and all the revenue has been paid to Google in the United States.
So from a tax perspective, Google may have paid these taxes in the United States.
In particular, the tax rates of various countries are actually completely different. Some countries have heavier tax burdens, and some countries have lighter tax burdens. In particular, some overseas island countries known as "tax havens" have become "reasonable tax avoidance" for many Internet companies. The most common way.
Take Apple, for example. In order to avoid the income tax of more than 35% in countries such as the United Kingdom and the United States, Apple used subsidiaries in low-tax countries such as Ireland to successfully avoid US$12 billion in taxes in 2012 alone.
This process is for Apple to establish a subsidiary in Ireland, where the tax rate is very low, and then use this subsidiary to provide services to its branch in the UK, and use most of the profits from the British market as "service fees" and "licensing fees" and other items were transferred to the Irish subsidiary.
In this way, Apple's branch in England has almost no profits and only needs to pay very low taxes; and in Ireland, because the tax rate is extremely low, they only need to pay very low taxes.
Of course, the United States, as the global hegemon, can use long-arm jurisdiction. Apple cannot avoid paying too much tax to the United States, but Britain and other countries in Europe have no way to deal with Apple's practices. …
Similarly, companies such as Google transfer tens of billions of advertising revenue to Bermuda subsidiaries registered for offshore tax avoidance every year, so they can avoid billions of taxes - between 2006 and 2011, Google The income taxes paid by European countries such as Britain, Germany, France, and Italy are only over one million euros.
As for companies such as Woaw, DailyVedio, and Argos Retail Group, they also use a lot of bandwidth, but because they are headquartered in England, especially the main markets of DailyVedio and Argos.com are in Europe, their advertisers are mainly European companies. , compared to those Internet companies in the United States, they pay slightly more taxes to the United Kingdom and other European countries.
Although they will also use some "reasonable tax avoidance" methods, since their base is in Europe, they will not go too far.
Therefore, companies such as Google, Yahoo, Amazon and Apple have made a lot of profits in the British and European markets, but only paid a few million in symbolic taxes. And the British alone have invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in improving their broadband networks. Tens of billions of pounds of funding, which naturally makes it very dissatisfied.
The so-called digital tax actually levies service fees from these Internet giants for their use of network infrastructure.
According to the British government, they will impose a "digital tax" on companies with global revenue exceeding 500 million pounds and revenue exceeding 25 million pounds in the British market - this also means that this tax is levied on Internet giants of a certain scale, and will not put pressure on Internet start-ups.
In other words, when you need to pay the "digital tax", it also means that the scale of this company can be called an Internet giant.
Although the collection of the "digital tax" will inevitably affect companies controlled by Barron, such as Woaw, DailyVedio and Argos.com, after all, even if they can avoid paying this tax in the UK because they pay more taxes to the British government, other European countries, and even countries around the world, will still increase their tax burden if they gradually levy this type of tax.
But in comparison, once the "digital tax" is levied, their competitors, such as Apple, Google, and Amazon, will be more uncomfortable.
And it can increase government revenue and help Europe strengthen network infrastructure construction. These burdens are still acceptable to Barron.
But then again, in Barron's previous life, countries including Europe, Japan and South Korea had the idea of levying a "digital tax", but in the end...
It is still quite difficult to collect this fee.
After all, these companies are all American companies, and they can't shirk their taxes on the United States...or dare not shirk too much, so America, as the base camp of these Internet companies, will definitely stand up to these Internet giants and even threaten Britain and other countries to compromise by retaliating.
In addition, it is very troublesome to calculate the tax base of the "digital tax" because the revenue data of Internet companies in Britain are not announced, and it is actually difficult for the British tax department to grasp how much money these Internet giants have made in Britain...
It is the same in other countries...
Of course, as listed companies, these companies publish their own financial reports, but these companies' financial reports can completely choose not to publish the specific income and profit situation in certain regions, so how to collect this money is not an easy task for the tax departments of Britain and other European countries.
