Who paid more tax last year: you or Facebook?

Facebook may have made a fortune last year, but you'll be shocked at how small its tax bill was.

Facebook paid less tax than the average UK taxpayer last year.

The social media giant paid a paltry £4,327 in Corporation Tax in 2014, while British workers earning the average salary would have paid over £5,000 on their income in Income Tax and National Insurance contributions.

According to its latest Companies House filing, the firm made a loss of a whopping £28.5 million in the UK last year, which is why it only had to hand over such a small amount of Corporation Tax.

Yet it handed out £35.4 million in shares to employees in Britain as part of a bonus scheme. Those shares are worth about £96,000 on average for each member of staff.

Last year Facebook made a profit of almost £2 billion worldwide.

Crackdown

The Government has talked of cracking down on firms that don't pay their fair share of tax, but this news calls into question whether it is really doing enough. Google, Amazon and Starbuck are all being investigated by the European Commission over how they pay tax in Europe, with warnings that the Commission could widen its probe further.

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