Palantir should be shut down tomorrow; the data it’s collected deleted, its IP destroyed and its executives jailed.
> contracts with customers were signed with Palantir’s US companies, which in turn paid a service fee to local country subsidiaries to deliver the work.
Similar trick are used by many companies, for example Starbucks UK conveniently paid £40m in "royalty and license fees" to the parent company resulting in a £35m loss in the UK.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/apr/15/starbuckss-...
If you threaten to leave the UK, sure go ahead, your market will be filled quickly. Same for Palantir.
If you begin selling in a different tax jurisdiction, that would be unfair that you have to start paying corporate taxes despite being unprofitable. It's not a brand new company and you're using the resources you built in the other country so royalty and licensing fee make sense. In other words, Starbucks brand name and operational efficiencies are assets that were developed in the US, so the US subsidiary should receive revenue from the service to the UK branch
It's never posted a profit despite about a billion in annual revenue, and so never paid a penny of corp tax.
Personally I think the tax authorities ought to take the line that a company posting losses like this is clearly not a viable, ongoing concern and ought to be wound up.
If Starbucks UK is a loss-making venture, they should have some explaining to do when they're opening new branches.
Others, for example using the same renderer:
1. NPM Supply Chain Attack Techniques: https://npm-supply-chain-attack-techniques.pagey.site/
2. NPM Ecosystem Threat Report: https://npm-supply-chain-attacks-25-26.pagey.site/
AI generated "slop" is here, and it's here to stay. In case you do find some error in content, point that out please.
https://www.nhs.uk/using-the-nhs/about-the-nhs/opt-out-of-sh...
funny way to spell 'steals from the public purse'
* Palantir started in the US as a start up and burned a lot of money building the systems they are running today and that are finally profitable
* Those systems are used from the UK subsidiary but if a different consultancy would use them, they would be billed accordingly. That's transfer pricing
Not sure how trustworthy it is, but assuming what https://palantir-uk-tax-evasion.pagey.site/ writes is true, then:
> a profit-allocation structure that lets most UK revenue/profit be recorded with the US parent instead of the UK subsidiary [...] Both only work because of a third factor: the US isn't taxing it either, so shifting profit "back" to the US isn't costly.
Seems a bit weird, they're not getting properly taxed anywhere in the world apparently. If they were properly taxed in the UK OR the US, things would have been different. But as noted, nothing here is illegal seemingly, just not good for anyone except Palantir.
I pay on the revenue. I also buy things. I also consume. And somehow I can manage with taxes on the revenue.
This would also solve the problem of companies that get 10 M€ in revenue, but somehow only 10€ is taxed because expenditure, capex etc
There should be only property tax and income tax, and the person paying the tax should be able to choose how to spend that money. Maybe you don't care and will let your congressmen to handle it, but maybe you would change your money to go to NASA or and then the government won't be able to spend so much on a pointless war or on building a stadium.
> Revenue is total money from core business activities before expenses are deducted.
> Income, or net income, is earnings remaining after all expenses are deducted from revenue.
Sorry for being pedantic. I don't understand why English has such ambiguous terms for something that shouldn't be. Or am I even more confused now?
To directly answer your comment: I agree that companies should be taxed on revenue and not income. Citizens are taxed on revenue, so why aren't companies?! They're supposed to be treated as people.
[1]: https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/122214/what-differe...
It would kill the economy overnight.
Taxing on the income also means that you can offload taxes elsewhere easily
It's not an easy problem.
I also run on narrow margins, and nobody cares.
Imo when you start thinking about it the most reasonable position is that corporate income tax should be 0. Instead we should focus on consumption taxes, land taxes and taxing other resources and especially pollution.
It’s all fixable with a modicum of effort but combined with the slop styling I’m not sure what you’re trying to achieve other than just pushing slop online.
These things are here, they are here to stay, and they will only get better. Better to learn to use them in correct manner, than shrug them off without any logical reasoning.
Pull the other one mate, it's got bells on.
Yes, any company can pay 0 taxes by taking all the money that they made and setting it on fire, in perpetuity.
LOL. You losing money with your business is no excuse to not pay taxes on profits you make after losing money. Just because you lost money doesn't mean you dont make profits until you earned back that money. Taxes should be paid every time you make money in the country your business operates in. Simple as that. Everybody benefits off of tax money.
Over what timescale? For instance, if the first month I operate my business I have a loss of $50,000 (have to buy initial supplies and equipment, hire employees, etc.), but in the second month sales start taking off and I net $20,000 do I (a) have a total loss of $30,000 and pay no tax or (b) owe taxes on the $20,000 in month two?
This can be extended, e.g. profit and loss can be calculated on a weekly, daily, or even hourly basis. In the extreme case, this is no longer a tax on profit but on revenue (which essentially runs any business that has a smaller margin than the tax rate out of business since every dollar of revenue coming in results in more tax liability than the business actually nets).
Before you say "obviously profit and loss should be calculated in a yearly cadence" I would note that the choice of a year is fairly arbitrary and this taxation scheme would greatly disincentive any sort of capital allocations that would take more than a year to payoff (as a small example, would incentive leasing equipment annually vs. buying outright).
What your companies bank account states is not what I care about as tax collector. The profits you make have nothing to do with the equipment you bought earlier to even start the business. Otherwise you could simply: Buy expensive stuff -> even out with profits, buy expensive stuff again, even out with profits and never pay taxes.
It discourages investments in your country.
Queensland has a payroll tax, I don’t believe this is can be offset against losses, see here for more info https://qro.qld.gov.au/payroll-tax/
GST is payable on goods they use and services they consume.
Mineral royalties are in Queensland https://qro.qld.gov.au/royalty/calculate-mineral/rates/
Employees of said company are required to pay income tax on their earnings.
So while it may be completely factual that a resource extraction company paid no tax on its corporate profits, it is not factually complete as there is tax revenue generated by the operation of the company.
A company that manages to generate no taxable profit isn’t necessarily committing tax evasion, that’s a crime. It is most likely practicing tax avoidance, which any economically rational actor ought to do.
Note, I’m not making a value judgement here.
There’s plenty of good arguments to be made that Australia’s taxation system is in need of reform, and many that I’m in favour but are beyond the scope of this discussion.
In this case, at the time they were proposing the project, Adani promised around $22 billion in taxes and royalties, and the industry body talked about enough money to fund schools, hospitals and other infrastructure for near to a century.
The royalties they pay are in the order of a few tens of million per annum, and they pay no corporation tax because of the accounting games they play. The company outright lied about the benefits it would deliver when it was trying to win permission for the project and is actively trying not to fulfil those promises.
Now, does this all point to a need for better legislation?
100%, but good luck with that when so many politicians walk into 'consultancy' jobs in the sector when they leave office.
(Also the whole "Oh but they pay income tax for their employees" is such weasel-worded nonsense. Sure they do, it's a cost of doing business. So does everyone else. They should also be paying significant royalties and corporation tax, and be slapped with hefty fines for the games they're playing with profit hiding)
Tax authorities don't need to do this. Investors will. Where will the money come from? If there's no future prospects, it will cease operations.
> If Starbucks UK is a loss-making venture, they should have some explaining to do when they're opening new branches.
I like how discussion of taxes turned everyone into a fierce defender of profit maximization. Nothing about adding back to the community, paying decent wages, etc.
You are fundamentally missing the issue. What most of these multinationals do is to extract value from the places they operate but then move all the profit (in the books) to another tax jurisdiction, thereby not contributing to the community where they operate. Furthermore this undercuts local businesses, further impoverishing the area.
Global commerce and cooperation unlocks some truly great opportunities but the finance people can really bring ruin if allowed free reign.
Australia has, if I understand correctly, the highest corporate profit tax rate in the OECD. Higher than New Zealand, the US, Canada, the UK, Ireland, Japan, Turkey, China, Greece, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, Iran, Zimbabwe, Iceland, Finland, Ukraine, Hungary, Qatar, Iceland, anyway…
Why wouldn’t you expatriate your profits and retain your loses as a multinational operating in Australia?
Australia is increasingly and rapidly driving itself toward a future where higher taxes result in lower tax revenues as individuals, business, and corporations pick up their capital and leave for jurisdictions with more favourable regulations and taxation.
Governments shouldn’t aim to maximise taxation, that always kills innovation and the entrepreneurial spirit. They should aim to optimise taxation to a point where businesses flourish and infrastructure is built and maintained, and otherwise generally not be heard from much at all.
That's the point, there are plenty of future prospects, but the company is playing accounting games to hide the profits.
> I like how discussion of taxes turned everyone into a fierce defender of profit maximization.
No, we're just calling bullshit on the whole thing because we're tired of wealthy multinationals dodging taxes in our countries. That's how they should be contributing.
Be like them and the corporations won’t have a need to offshore their profit.
The alternative is One World Government, which, in its lesser form, empire, has a nasty habit rapidly turning quite sour.
No thanks! I'd rather have a functioning society!
It doesn’t help that there are Card Carrying Socialist activists in our public school system in Australia, indoctrinating kids in to a politically and economically bent out of shape ideology.
I don’t believe many Australians are aware of just how dangerously few steps away from the mouldy bread and rotting fish head soup lines version of “equality” we really are.
Since when has government, of any sort, been a reliable arbiter of truth or wisdom?
P.J. O’Rourke would be turning in his grave.
Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.
Socialists in Schools: https://www.victoriansocialists.org.au/campaigns/socialists-...
Unfortunately, VAT is a consumption tax that has little to do with the company. Your gov thinks you need to pay it because you consume. Are you paying a consumption tax on investments? No that would be really dumb
All of these factors, and many more play into the "profit" of an operation like Starbucks, so how do you determine what the real true profit of that one cup of coffee is? It is much simpler to simply say "Hey, just hand over x% of profits at the end of the year" with some reasonable guidelines as to how accounting should be done (see stuff like GAP for example) than to sit down and determine what the individual "profit" is for every single individual cup of coffee sold at every single Starbucks location.
>Otherwise you could simply: Buy expensive stuff -> even out with profits, buy expensive stuff again, even out with profits and never pay taxes.
Yep, you could do this. Only problem is, uh, you never make any money. If you're running a hobby or something, that's fine, but most people owning business want to realize some profit...
If course there are still shenanigans you can pull between different tax districts, but someone somewhere needs to realize a profit at some point - otherwise they are running a jobs program and not a business.
>Yep, you could do this. Only problem is, uh, you never make any money. If you're running a hobby or something, that's fine, but most people owning business want to realize some profit...
Debt is technically profit in that sense, as long as you can pay it back.
When you first invest 100k and then sell something for 2$ you don't make a profit for a while. You may be arguing for some other tax but it's ridiculous to argue income tax should be paid until revenue > costs.
>>If you dont make profit on that sale, I have bad news for your business idea.
When doing business you often don't know if you will make profit or not. In the coffee example you don't know how many you are going to sell so it's impossible to "include costs in the cup of coffee" because that depends on how many you are going to sell and that's unknown. Your whole line of reasoning makes 0 sense.
Every unit of coffee you sell should turn a profit. Which in turn should be taxed. Even cigarettes that probably only turn micro cents profit should be taxed by per unit sold. They even are, given their sales are heavily regulated.
No company is giving out "free" products without making a profit just to go even on their initial investment.