Did you pay more tax than Facebook last year?
Facebook is under fire once again after its latest figures show that it paid just £4,327 in corporation tax last year - less than the average British worker.
The average UK salary is £26,500, out of which the worker pays just under £6,000 in income tax and national insurance contributions.
However, Facebook is paying less, despite having recorded UK sales of £105 million and global profits of $2.9 billion for 2014. By paying its 362 UK staff a total of £35.4 million in share bonuses, it officially recorded a pre-tax loss of £28.5 million for the year.
However, its £4,327 cheque to the taxman marks an improvement over the previous two years, when it paid nothing at all.
Revelations like this are depressingly frequent, and the European Commission is currently investigating Google, Amazon, Starbucks and a division of Fiat over their tax arrangements.
Last week, it released a report examining how companies shift their profits around Europe to take advantage of the different tax regimes, and announced plans to force them to report profits on a country-by-country basis.
However, it stopped short of banning the widespread practice of allowing companies to treat their subsidiaries as separate entities. In this way, they can claim that the UK operation has had to make huge 'licensing' payments to a Dutch arm, for example, cutting the official British profit to almost nothing.
"We urgently need a new global institutional forum for setting rules on tax multinationals that meet the needs of all countries and don't solely address the interests of the rich OECD countries and their multinational companies," says John Christensen, director of the Tax Justice Network.
Despite having cut the rate of corporation tax from 28% to 21% (and promising to cut it still further), chancellor George Osborne says he plans to clamp down on tax avoidance from big multinational firms.
New legislation will see a 25% 'Diverted Profits Tax' applied when companies attempt to shift profits elsewhere. It's expected to raise as much as £1.3 billion.
Facebook, meanwhile, has issued a by-now familiar statement to the Sunday Times: "We are compliant with UK tax law, and in fact in all countries where we have operations and offices," it says.
Read more on AOL Money:
Amazon 'still not paying fair share' of tax
Starbucks boss Mark Fox unrepentant about tax avoidance
Speed camera firm RedSpeed International pays peanuts in tax
