Be careful, Australia
That China doesn't build an airfield on Heard Island and claim its their territory (and all the sea around it)
133 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Feb 2012
"If you do business in a country then you should pay that countries tax."
No it won't work.
Well as my personal experience example above. Imagine you are a small SME selling stuff all over the world - do you really want to have to do a full corporate tax return in every country you sell to just because you sold 10 widgets costing $300 there? Then if you have no sales the next year you'd still have to do the tax return to prove you sold/earned nothing. And, say, for others selling to the UK you were late submitting tax return or made a mistake you might get nailed a penalty that could be far in excess of the value of sales.
How would you apportion 'profit' to each country? you'd have to include the cost of compliance with local tax laws and subtract what the local tax account is charging you.
For my company, we would sell a few 100K's worth of stuff (ideally, but maybe only $250 yes, really!) to different countries... I personally dealt with 8 countries our profit margins was not like Apple. Should my salary be attributed to the country I reside and pay tax in or from the region I oversaw or be apportioned equally across the countries or in proportion with the sales volume?... Or do you suggest I have to pay salary tax in 8 different countries too? Think about it for a moment and the current system is simplest and workable - maybe not perfect but there's nothing better. Maybe if the OECD normalizes tax rates there will be less gaming the system and it will work..
So there are loads of reasons it won't work.
I used to be the overseas office of a small UK firm.
All the invoices and $$ went back to the UK, profit if any was wholly in the UK and tax was paid in UK etc... there was no tax paid in my overseas location, except by me on my salary.
That is how it works.... This is exactly what Facebook are doing.
The alternative you suggest is that the small UK firm has to pay corporation tax on all the /revenue/ (or profit - how to work that out) that it earns in the 50 different countries it does business in, with their different tax years and special rules and so on.
The current system is not perfect but the alternatives are expensive tax authority bureaucratic nightmares. You might nail Facebook for a few millions but just watch the SMEs get crushed by additional unnecessary tax accounting charges.
Virtula (information) is not same as (physical) selling counterfeit medicine, fake jet engine components, fake high tensile bolts for nuclear reactors or shipping industry is not the same as virtual goods...
It's not like British Airways bit torrents the airplane control software either. Or the NHS doctors pirate audiobooks how to remove appendix...
Brenda, you need to check the employment statistics at the Higher Education Statitics Authority hesa.ac.uk - computer science has the highest unemployment rate 14.4% among graduates followed closely by engineering. Contrast with medicine at 0.2-3%
There is no skills shortage that will be fixed with more unemployed cs and eng graduates.
Reminds me of a story from base station installers... they were told to go and take the antennas down of site 10- they just finished installing it the week before. The site was live and carrying traffic. Ouch.
Turns out they reused the site number, the contractors only knew of the one site of that number, not the old site 10. Lesson learned - don't reuse numbers.
In this case the real culprits seem to have been on the receiving end...
But we need to be careful here...
What if the culprit used someone else's identity?... this will become the new way to harm someone... Set up a false account (with the victims identity) and threaten a celeb or the Feds...etc
Like you, I object to being blamed for this. I'm sure many geek parents wish their girls would take more interest in these things too - but I guess they have little more success than everyone else.
At uni in the mid 80s there was only 1 girl out of 65 on my degree course - so whatever happened happened long before that, at my A levels it was the same.
The way I see it a only a tiny proportion of the population are actually interested in this stuff. Only 10% of all graduates are in all computing & 'all' engineering ~40k (https://www.hesa.ac.uk/stats qualifications by subject table) the same number as in creative arts or 'allied to medicine' or social science or 2/3 of business&admin. So that's less than 5% of population doing IT and relevant engineering.
If we wonder why females aren't interested then we should also wonder why 95% of the population isn't interested either.
Are you suggesting women will take up IT in preference to law because (some) apps are cool?
How on earth is Law fashionable for women - is Ally McBeal a role model?
Maybe, but I would warn everyone against such an attempt at following today's fashion. App developers don't make much money (sure some do, on average and in general they don't). The technology might drastically change and there will be armies of others to do the work, you might get in just in time to see your potential career outsourced. There is a low barrier to entry to app development - anyone can download the development kits for free and get started. This is not the recipe for a long, financially rewarding career that will allow you to pay the student loan off.