Until recently, tax has rarely been tabloid fodder. Apart from the occasional scandal, tax is just not particularly sexy or newsworthy. Or at least it wasn’t. If you’ve turned on the TV or looked at a newspaper recently, you will have noticed that while it still may lack something in the sex department, austerity has placed tax at the top of the business, political and news agendas.
Governments everywhere are keen to chase every potential pound of revenue and most are equally keen to reinforce the idea that this means everyone bearing an equal share of the burden. The chorus in the UK (and elsewhere) remains that we are “all in it together”. This in turn has led to a sharper focus on fairness and more scrutiny of the contribution made by wealthy individuals and big business.
Even though the vast majority of tax revenue comes from these sources (large firms contribute the bulk of corporation tax and the wealthiest few contribute more income tax than anyone else), there is still a feeling that those wealthy enough to be able to invest in legal means of minimising tax are not contributing as much as they should.
In such an atmosphere, it has been easy to find support for campaigns to “expose” those playing by the rules but not perhaps the spirit of all being in it together. The problem is that such schemes jar with prevailing public notions of the impacts of austerity, fairness and morality. Popular campaign groups, the press and even several senior politicians (most surprisingly including the business secretary) have weighed in to the debate with a wave of naming and shaming businesses in the same way that wealthy individuals were picked out for attention by the Times earlier in the year.
This approach led to the Public Accounts Committee summoning companies such as Starbucks, Amazon and Google to face tough questions about alleged tax avoidance with the result that all potentially face reputational damage. The potential for financial harm through subsequent lost sales has apparently been enough to push Starbucks to make the extremely unusual announcement of a voluntary £10m contribution this year with another £10m next year. This will be seen by some commentators as a capitulation to blackmail and by others as a poor attempt to buy back public favour. Conor Delaney, tax lawyer at Milestone International Tax Partners says the coffee giant has been “publicly embarrassed and blackmailed” into the payments.
So it is into this lively arena that PwC has launched a new report into the total tax contribution made by businesses at the smaller end of the spectrum. Produced on behalf of Prelude Group, an entrepreneurial support and training business that has been described as a “do tank rather than a think tank”, it uses PwC’s Total Tax Contribution methodology to work out the long-term contribution of seven fast-growth businesses.
The unsung heroes of business: entrepreneurs and their total tax contribution, highlights just how much these businesses contribute to the UK economy, through a combination of direct and indirect tax payments. Importantly it also dismisses the increasingly popular notion that all businesses and all entrepreneurs are obsessed with avoiding tax. As Alex Cheatle, co-founder of lifestyle management business Ten Group, and one of the entrepreneurs who opened his books for the report, says, “Like most entrepreneurs I am obsessed with creating high quality products and services and building a team; I am not obsessed with reducing the rate of corporation tax”.
He claims that £34 of every £120 he gets from a customer goes in tax. According to calculations in the report, over the last five years his business has made a tax contribution of equivalent to 789 entry-level nurses, while Instant Offices (another business featured) has contributed the equivalent of 920, and (appropriately enough) Health Management has contributed the equivalent of 1,170. All together the seven businesses analysed in this report have generated a total tax contribution of £104.2m over the last five years.
This report represents a laudable attempt to place a more positive spin on the contribution made by business. And it is essential that the message gets out that just as the vast majority of individual taxpayers at all income levels are paying their way, so most businesses make a huge contribution to the wealth of the economy.
But there is a darker, unspoken story here. None of the entrepreneurs mention it, but surely they must baulk at the fact that they are not operating on a level playing field when it comes to tax. Those with the international operations and the resources to do so can apparently avail themselves of systematic, informal tax breaks, those that don’t have the wherewithal can’t. While many business owners appreciate the government’s efforts to reduce the UK’s corporation tax rate to one of the lowest in Europe, many more would appreciate greater resource being given to HMRC and greater emphasis on closing loopholes.
The Starbucks case shows the importance of business reputation, but what it really highlights is the need for greater tax transparency.
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