UK Digital Services Tax Raises Record $430 Million Thanks To Top Tech Giants

The UK Government is speaking about how the digital services tax has managed to raise a record figure of $430 million (£360m) during its first 12 months. And during this period, most of it was believed to have arisen from five of the leading tech firms.

This type of tax that takes 2% of the gross revenue made in the UK was partly collected to stop people from evading their taxes like Apple. Others who have been shown to be paying this DST include the likes of Google, Facebook, and even Amazon.

In case you didn’t know, there has really been a huge list of complaints regarding tech firms in America that happen to pay very little tax in such places. Moreover, another common tactic we saw was Apple and Google trying to make new headquarters in places like Ireland this is where so many business taxes are taken at a lower level and you end up declaring profits through sales in places like Europe that were produced from such headquarters and not separate nations such as the UK.

This meant people would end up avoiding huge corporation taxes that get charged across profits instead of the likes of revenue.

This really ended up with a court battle that was high profile between the EU and Ireland. And here, Ireland had been accused of offering different firms like Apple a tax arrangement that would make them fall in love with the country.

Under the law of the European Union, it’s actually very wrong for different member nations to provide favorable tax arrangements to various firms.
If it is Ireland that loses such a case, this would end up charging Apple billions for underpaid taxes. But it so happened that Ireland won and that meant Apple actually didn’t have to pay anything.

Meanwhile, a huge set of nations from Europe did try to tackle a chunk of the issue by putting up taxes on leading tech firms that continued to produce so much revenue with no checks and balances in play. Now, they would be forced to pay a chunk of their profits in the name of taxes.

Among the different EU nations, it was France came first to set out the new tech tax of 3% revenue. Meanwhile, the UK was a part of the others who followed the sample too, and hence today, we’ve got the DST in 2020.


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