Marple Website Community Calendar
Archive => Archived Boards => Miscellaneous => Topic started by: marplerambler on December 31, 2012, 10:31:34 AM
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I have just responded to a request asking for old images of Strines by recommending that he 'googles Stockport Council Image Archive' to see their fantastic collection of old photographs of all districts which are now part of Stockport MBC and at the same time I realise that I face a moral dilemma! I am boycotting Boots, Cadbury, Starbucks, Caffe Nero, Amazon and Ebay (for details of more tax avoiders check the '38 degrees' website). They don't want to pay British so I am shopping elsewhere but I cannot find a satisfactory alternative to tax avoiding Google. The MSN search on my computer is useless, Ask Jeeves is not particularly brilliant. Is there a satisfactory alternative to Google which does pay British tax? Secondly 38 degrees shows 13 big tax avoiding companies. Does anyone know of newspaper articles or reports about other companies in Marple and Stockport which avoid tax? No personal speculation which could get an individual (or Marple Website) into trouble please - just reference to newspaper articles or bona fide reports which have been published elsewhere.
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Perhaps you should ask for the names and addresses of anyone who has opened an ISA during the past 10 years, or bought some Post Office savings products or has been paying into an Occupational AVC directly from their pay? Or, indeed, supporting a charity via Give as you Earn. They are all tax "avoiders".
No rational individual or organisation is going to pay more tax than they are legally obliged to, especially when we see the waste that Governments always create (eg regional centres for Fire, Ambulance etc that cost many billions but have never been used, NHS computer systems that don't actually work, huge sums of money spent on tax credits that actually leave the country etc etc etc)
It is the politicians that create the tax laws in this country, not Google.
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Cut the crap please Bowden Guy. If you have nothing constructive to say, don't bother answering. You know as well as I do that ISAs and tax relief on donations to charity are ways that the government are willing to forego revenue in an attempt to encourage saving and charitable giving and that this question is not a request for a rant about government policies or public sector waste or inefficiency. Governments will always be one step behind the multinationals because the multinationals will always find loopholes to avoid tax and time is needed to legislate to close these loopholes. I am fully aware that no-one enjoys paying tax or sitting forever watching the phone bill soar waiting for the Inland Revenue to answer the phone. There are the Diddymen in this country who grit their teeth and pay because death and taxation are the only two inevitable things in life and there are the multinational companies who are quite blatant in their attempts to ensure that they act within the law of this Country (just) and at the same time ensure that their taxable profits are made in tax havens so I will rephrase my question as follows: Does anyone know of newspaper articles or reports about other companies in Marple and Stockport which avoid tax by attempting to minimise profits in this country to ensure that the profit will be made in a tax haven? No personal speculation which could get an individual (or Marple Website) into trouble please - just reference to newspaper articles or bona fide reports which have been published elsewhere.
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Cut the crap please Bowden Guy. If you have nothing constructive to say, don't bother answering. You know as well as I do that ISAs and tax relief on donations to charity are ways that the government are willing to forego revenue in an attempt to encourage saving and charitable giving and that this question is not a request for a rant about government policies or public sector waste or inefficiency. Governments will always be one step behind the multinationals because the multinationals will always find loopholes to avoid tax and time is needed to legislate to close these loopholes. I am fully aware that no-one enjoys paying tax or sitting forever watching the phone bill soar waiting for the Inland Revenue to answer the phone. There are the Diddymen in this country who grit their teeth and pay because death and taxation are the only two inevitable things in life and there are the multinational companies who are quite blatant in their attempts to ensure that they act within the law of this Country (just) and at the same time ensure that their taxable profits are made in tax havens so I will rephrase my question as follows: Does anyone know of newspaper articles or reports about other companies in Marple and Stockport which avoid tax by attempting to minimise profits in this country to ensure that the profit will be made in a tax haven? No personal speculation which could get an individual (or Marple Website) into trouble please - just reference to newspaper articles or bona fide reports which have been published elsewhere.
And of coarse theBlack economy .that must be worth a few billions a year .
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Ask a simple question and you get an irrelevant answer! I don't like the black economy either but I am seeking an answer to a straight forward question and I am getting replies that indicate why Marple people have stopped using the Marple Website because the original question or topic becomes buried unanswered beneath a mountain of irrelevant rubbish.
Once again. I do not want to use Google because they are evading UK taxes (please have a look at my original message). Can anyone suggest an appropriate alternative please?
I am not interested in ISAs, Post Offices, call centres or NHS computers in response to my particular question even though I do enjoy reading the diverse opinions of other Marpudlians in context please do me a favour and express your opinions in the appropriate context. Adminstrator please note! The fact that male sea horses give birth to baby sea horses or the diversion of buses from Hereford to Worcester due to flooding is just as relevant as the answers I have received so far. The more irrelevant answers I receive the more the Administrator begin to question if the Marple website is losing its way because it is dominated by a small number of people dominating the site making comments in an attempt to head the league table for the highest number of entries on the site.
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I have just responded to a request asking for old images of Strines by recommending that he 'googles Stockport Council Image Archive' to see their fantastic collection of old photographs of all districts which are now part of Stockport MBC and at the same time I realise that I face a moral dilemma! I am boycotting Boots, Cadbury, Starbucks, Caffe Nero, Amazon and Ebay (for details of more tax avoiders check the '38 degrees' website). They don't want to pay British so I am shopping elsewhere but I cannot find a satisfactory alternative to tax avoiding Google. The MSN search on my computer is useless, Ask Jeeves is not particularly brilliant. Is there a satisfactory alternative to Google which does pay British tax? Secondly 38 degrees shows 13 big tax avoiding companies. Does anyone know of newspaper articles or reports about other companies in Marple and Stockport which avoid tax? No personal speculation which could get an individual (or Marple Website) into trouble please - just reference to newspaper articles or bona fide reports which have been published elsewhere.
Microsoft's MSN (http://www.msn.com) and Bing (http://www.bing.com) search engines would need boycotting too, given that it's been reported (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/retailandconsumer/9733504/Tax-row-turns-to-Microsoft-over-1.7bn-of-online-revenues.html) they paid £0 UK tax on £1.7bn online revenue from the UK.
Perhaps you should just content yourself with using these companies regardless, but at the same time never click the adverts that appear when using them, therefore reducing the money they make from you?
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Apt username ;)
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Many thanks sgk. That's two off the list right away. I was beginning to feel like Ronnie Corbett being asked for four candles (or was it fork handles?).
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Which countries do you think Google should pay tax in? It is accessible in almost all countries of the world - are you expecting it to pay taxes in all of them?
Suppose an American family reads the Marple website, clicks on one of the advertisers and orders some of their goods by post (you never know!). Should the Marple website pay American taxes? That would be ludicrous.
I expect Google to pay taxes in whichever country it has a physical (not virtual) presence. I'm guessing that most of its manpower and servers are located in America and will be depending on American infrastructure. Therefore, it should be paying American not British taxes.
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Which countries do you think Google should pay tax in? It is accessible in almost all countries of the world - are you expecting it to pay taxes in all of them?
Suppose an American family reads the Marple website, clicks on one of the advertisers and orders some of their goods by post (you never know!). Should the Marple website pay American taxes? That would be ludicrous.
I expect Google to pay taxes in whichever country it has a physical (not virtual) presence. I'm guessing that most of its manpower and servers are located in America and will be depending on American infrastructure. Therefore, it should be paying American not British taxes.
Suppose the Marple website employed 1,300 people in America though. And paid 0.87% of its American turnover as tax. Acceptable?
Google are thought to have about a million servers in their datacentres, spread around the world. Makes no sense to host all your very-heavy-traffic servers in the US, would bring latency and bandwidth issues/costs.
- Google 1,300 UK employees, 0.87% of UK turnover paid as tax.
- Facebook 90 UK employees, 18% of UK turnover paid as tax. Zuckerberg the good guy. Who knew?
- Wal-Mart (ASDA) no idea how many UK employees, 0.87% of UK turnover paid as tax. All that tax evasion means you can pay £12m for a college building I guess. Shame they don't just fund the UK education system to start with, via proper tax channels, like the majority of Marple local traders do.
Source : http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2012/oct/16/tax-biggest-us-companies-uk (http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2012/oct/16/tax-biggest-us-companies-uk)
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Further to your request concerning local businesses and their tax position. May I recommend cross-referencing the Marple Business Directory with the accounts lodged at Companies House. This will allow you to research local companies and their tax payments and avoid all forms of unsupported speculation.
There will be a cost to accessing this information but if it is your professional interest you may be able to offset the cost against your personal tax - this is a potential allowance not avoidance.
Have a Happy and Prosperous New Year everyone.
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Dragging the topic back to its original point, you might try duckduckgo.com (https://duckduckgo.com)which is a search engine which uses information from crowdsourced websites such as Wikipedia to augment traditional results and improve relevance. The search engine policy emphasises privacy and does not record user information. Because users are not profiled, the "filter bubble" can be avoided, with all users being shown the same search results for a given search term.
I have no knowledge of their tax position in the UK but my impression is that they take a more ethical position than other search providers.
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Ask a simple question and you get an irrelevant answer! I don't like the black economy either but I am seeking an answer to a straight forward question and I am getting replies that indicate why Marple people have stopped using the Marple Website because the original question or topic becomes buried unanswered beneath a mountain of irrelevant rubbish.
I agree !
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Ask a simple question and you get an irrelevant answer! I don't like the black economy either but I am seeking an answer to a straight forward question and I am getting replies that indicate why Marple people have stopped using the Marple Website because the original question or topic becomes buried unanswered beneath a mountain of irrelevant rubbish.
I agree !
I didn't realise that you spoke for "Marple people".
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Dragging the topic back to its original point, you might try duckduckgo.com (https://duckduckgo.com)which is a search engine which uses information from crowdsourced websites such as Wikipedia to augment traditional results and improve relevance. The search engine policy emphasises privacy and does not record user information. Because users are not profiled, the "filter bubble" can be avoided, with all users being shown the same search results for a given search term.
I have no knowledge of their tax position in the UK but my impression is that they take a more ethical position than other search providers.
The only problem with this suggestion, Howard, is that information posted on Wikipaedia is frequently inaccurate.
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The only problem with this suggestion, Howard, is that information posted on Wikipaedia is frequently inaccurate.
Wikipedia is one source of the search engine's results hence the use of the word "augment"; no-one should use Wikipedia as a single source for their information although I would argue with your use of the work "frequently". From THEIR OWN ARTICLE http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_accuracy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_accuracy) "Between 2008 and 2010, articles in medical and scientific fields such as pathology, toxicology, oncology and pharmaceuticals comparing Wikipedia to professional and peer-reviewed sources found that Wikipedia's depth and coverage were of a high standard.". The article also addresses vandalism and shows comparative studies against other Encyclopaedic resources showing Wikipedia is of similar accuracy to articles in Encyclopaedia Britannica.
My point was that duckduckgo.com (https://duckduckgo.com/) is making a brave attempt at taking a different approach to providing results for its users by trying to address the concerns such as user profiling and tracking which is what Bing and Google do. If people want an alternative to Google then I have provided an option.
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I have just responded to a request asking for old images of Strines by recommending that he 'googles Stockport Council Image Archive' to see their fantastic collection of old photographs of all districts which are now part of Stockport MBC and at the same time I realise that I face a moral dilemma! I am boycotting Boots, Cadbury, Starbucks, Caffe Nero, Amazon and Ebay (for details of more tax avoiders check the '38 degrees' website). They don't want to pay British so I am shopping elsewhere but I cannot find a satisfactory alternative to tax avoiding Google. The MSN search on my computer is useless, Ask Jeeves is not particularly brilliant. Is there a satisfactory alternative to Google which does pay British tax? Secondly 38 degrees shows 13 big tax avoiding companies. Does anyone know of newspaper articles or reports about other companies in Marple and Stockport which avoid tax? No personal speculation which could get an individual (or Marple Website) into trouble please - just reference to newspaper articles or bona fide reports which have been published elsewhere.
It may be worth asking 38 degrees how much tax they pay as an organisation. Hypocrisy can be pretty hypocritical sometimes.
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StartPage.com is the best alternative search engine, it uses Google,
but encrypts your search criteria, so it doesn't record your data.
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StartPage.com is the best way to keep your search info private and not sold by Google for marketing data.
;)
Moderator edit: merged with the topic you posted exactly the same information in.
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http://www.thesearchenginelist.com/
Have a look here.....