Partner Article

Corporate tax avoiders: is it the consumer choice?

Some of you may have seen Sainsbury’s boss Justin King on Channel 4 news this week. He was talking corporate tax avoiders, and quitely neatly answered the “where do we go now” question.

He said corporation tax was an “elective” tax, and companies could quite legally choose to arrange their tax affairs so as to pay wherever they wanted to.

Therefore, he suggested the power was in the hands of the consumer, not the governments. Accountancy firm Baker Tilly conducted a survey of consumer atittudes over the Christmas period and found 60% of their respondents said tax avoidance would not deter them from buying goods from a company.

Does this mean there’s simply not enough appetite to combat tax avoidance, or perhaps the whole affair is more about headlines? Let me know what you think in the comments below.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Tom Keighley .