On November 12, 2012, I found a news article posted in "The Telegraph" titled, "Starbucks, Amazon and Google accused of being 'immoral'." I suddenly became interested in the article since Starbucks, Amazon and Google are quite huge companies and the problem they were facing was tax avoidance (Tax is a property of accountants).
The article was about Starbucks, Amazon, and Google were "practicing tax avoidance on an industrial scale". Firstly, Starbucks was criticized for paying small amount of tax despite the huge revenue. Starbucks refuted by saying that even thought they made high revenue, due to high royalties and other payments to offshore companies, they had no profit. Then Amazon was criticized for the same problem. "Despite having its warehouses in the Uk and employing 15,000 people, Amazon drives all of its sales through Luxembourg." Since Luxembourg has low income tax rate, Amazon drove all of its revenues to Luxembourg. Finally, Google, also, paid only 0.4% of its earning. Lord Myners, the former City minister, scolded accountants for letting all these to happen. However, the actions of these companies are not illegal. It is just immoral, which means that accountants could not just stop them.
After reading this article, I learned that huge companies like Google and Starbucks try to cheat in paying taxes. Since I want to become an accountant, I became worried that even though accountant is honest, if its client is not honest, it can cause problems to accountants.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/consumertips/tax/9673358/Starbucks-Amazon-and-Google-accused-of-being-immoral.html
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