Facebook published its 2017 accounts in the UK, showing that its tax bill had risen to £17m after it had changed its structure to book more revenues onshore. However, as Taxwatch director George Turner told the Independent, Facebook’s real profits in the UK are likely to be much higher.
Record levels of tax relief claimed by the creative industries sector in 2023. The reliefs are now dominated by fewer, extremely large, claims for film and ‘high-end’ TV programmes. TaxWatch questions whether these reliefs offer good value for money given the profitability of expensive productions in light of changes to the Audio Visual Expenditure Credit.
Once again, the National Audit Office qualified HMRC’s accounts due to a “material level of error and fraud in Corporation Tax research and development reliefs”. Whilst the good news is that the estimated error rate within the relief is coming down it remains unacceptably high. It has taken years for HMRC to admit there were problems, despite plenty of warnings, and action has been too slow to avoid the situation getting totally out of hand.