COMMENT: Are you paying Amazon’s tax?

The tax burden on SMEs has rarely been as great, and hiked further by the additional National Insurance added by the current government.

Added to the legislative burden, the cost and additional paperwork required from each coach and bus operator – and a myriad other businesses – is truly epic, and showing no sign of abating. But there’s something about the tax burden on SMEs which has bothered me for years.

There appears to be no pushback from SMEs and larger, UK businesses, against the epic amount of tax avoidance perpetrated on the UK economy by multi-national companies. No tax year goes by without another revelation that huge companies with postboxes in low-tax economies have absorbed profits as ‘licensing’ costs and ended up paying single-figure percentages of corporation tax.

Every time this is revealed, these companies hit back to tell us how many people’s wages they support, as if their employees paying personal tax is an excuse for them not to pay a fair share of their own.

Make no mistake, every billion of tax they avoid comes back to haunt SMEs and wholly domestic businesses. You shoulder the burden. You, and your employees, are making up the difference.

We live in a modern economy that believes that providing services such as healthcare, the police and education is a common good, and benefits the whole of our economy including employers. People worrying how they might pay for these services are not effective in the workplace. There is an direct benefit to business of a healthy, safe and well-educated workforce.

So the avoidance of fair taxation is not only an economic cost to SMEs, there is a moral aspect. When multinational corporations avoid paying taxes, they don’t just cheat the government, they cheat you and your employees, too.

I am, frankly, amazed that entrepreneurial companies which employ comfortably 60% of the workforce and drive innovation aren’t beating the doors down in Westminster, demanding that the government begins legislating in any way they can to prevent corporations offshoring their profits. Yet no collaborative effort to close these tax loopholes has, to my knowledge, been launched.