Facebook trends on Facebook for not paying tax

£371 million in revenue and £0 in tax - no wonder people are sharing the story

Facebook’s trending box highlights the stories that the site's users are most interested in and this morning one bit of news stood out: the fact that Facebook itself paid exactly zero in UK corporation tax last year.

We would laugh and say that the company was ‘hoist by their own petard’ apart from a) who actually says that, b) is it ‘hoisted’? and c) it won’t make any difference.

Last year Facebook’s UK operation made an estimated £371 million in revenue and it paid out an extra £72.5 million to its employees here in shares (that works out at around £350,000 per head if they held on to them) but the company is never going to pay extra tax until the government closes up the various loop-holes and avoidance schemes that let it get away with nothing.

The offending trending.

In fact, Facebook did actually pay some corporation tax last year but the piddling £3,169 they contributed (yes, that’s three thousand one hundred and sixty nine pounds) was offset by the tens of thousands of tax credits they received from the Treasury.

So: what would you like to see trending on Facebook instead?