Big US tech firms accused of 'aggressive' tax avoidance

The big American tech firms known as the "silicon six" have been accused of paying almost $278bn (£211bn) less corporate income tax in the last decade compared with the statutory rate for US firms making the same profits.

- Sarah Butler

Amazon, Facebook's owner, Meta, Google's owner, Alphabet, Netflix, Apple and Microsoft generated $11tn of revenue and $2.5tn of profits over the past 10 years.

Yet they paid an average of 18.8% in combined national and federal corporation taxes, compared with an average 29.7% in the US, according to the Fair Tax Foundation, which said the silicon six had "hard-wired" tax avoidance into their business models.

Analysis by the not-for-profit organisation found that if one-off repatriation tax payments in the US connected to historical tax avoidance were excluded, the average corporate income tax paid by the six firms fell to 16.1% over the past decade.

The companies also inflated their stated tax payments by $82bn over the same period by including contingencies for tax they did not expect to pay, the report said.