What you can do about Facebook tax avoidance

You won’t have missed the news that despite raking in £105 million in advertising and sales, Facebook contributed a miserly £4327 towards the national coffers last year. That’s £1000 less than the amount taken from a worker on the average UK salary of £26,500, who would be liable for £5392 in tax and national insurance. Facebook’s total profits for the year topped $2.9bn, almost double the figure for 2013. That’s why the tax figure is so shocking.

Voice your outrage on Facebook and share our infographic with your friends

My first (polite) reaction was to ask: how can we be living in a country that allows one of the largest companies in the world to give less towards our society than the average working person does? My second was to question what we might be able to do about it. A boycott won’t work because too many people and organisations - including charities - are reliant on the site. With 1.39 billion users, it is easy to see why the third sector loves Facebook. It’s one of the most effective ways to engage with the public and, more fundamentally, to raise money. Charities are securing millions of pounds through the site, but the other side of this is that Facebook is making millions of pounds on the back of charities. Not only that, the firm's spending a whack on employing accountants and lawyers to find ways of reducing the amount of tax it is due. How else would it get away with paying such a small figure? Working in this way, you may be tax compliant. But it’s highly doubtful whether you’re morally compliant. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says his life mission is “to make the world a more open place”. I’d say he has a lot to think about. If we want to send a strong message that this kind of behaviour is unacceptable, then we need to register our disgust. We need take action from within. Let’s hit Facebook on Facebook.

• Voice your outrage on Facebook and share our infographic with your friends.
• Ask your most trusted brands to share their disgust too by highlighting the issue on their Facebook pages.
• Post about your disgust on the Facebook pages of political parties.
• Post about your disgust on Facebook’s own Facebook page.

If there’s one thing that unites charities it’s our shared ambition to build a fairer and more equal society. On that basis, leaders in the third sector need to be ready to call the practices of this company to account. What better way to achieve change than to use the very medium of the network itself. So get online and tell Facebook how appalled you are. Register your dislike – and tell your friends to do the same. You can find our Facebook dislike infographic here.