eBay Paid A Whopping £1.6 Million Corporation Tax In 2016
Even though its American parent firm’s United Kingdom activities brought in a total of £1 Billion in sales last year, the UK division of American multinational e-commerce major eBay paid a mere £1.6 Million in corporate tax.
What does corporate tax mean? If your company is a limited company, you will have to pay corporation tax on all of the earnings you make from trade as well as on the sale of assets or investments. The rate is 19% at the moment.
Corporate tax rates vary greatly amongst nations, with some having extremely low rates and being labelled as tax havens.
History
Pierre Omidyar launched eBay in 1995, and it quickly rose to prominence as a noteworthy dot-com bubble success story. As of 2019, eBay is a multibillion-dollar company with operations in around 32 nations.
French-born Iranian American millionaire Pierre Morad Omidyar was raised in France. He is the creator of eBay and a technology entrepreneur, software engineer, and philanthropist. He was chairman of eBay from 1998 to 2015.
In October 2012, The Sunday Times revealed that eBay only paid £1.2 million in taxes on over £800 million in sales.
Records
According to eBay’s UK account records, a Swiss parent firm contributed all of the company’s £200 million in revenues, which appear to have come from serving as the company’s direct-to-consumer advertising partner.
eBay refuses to comment on why its sales in the UK were not recorded. Researchers claim that eBay’s data analytics have already led to major financial triumphs.
5,000 data analysts are employed by the company to support data-driven decision making.