Amazon bags £425m in work from UK government as it is criticised over tax
Amazon has reaped a total of £425m in UK government contracts in the past two years, it has emerged in a report, prompting fresh criticism that the tech giant is failing to pay a fair share of tax in the country.
The report, by the Centre for International Corporate Tax Accountability and Research (CICTAR) with assistance from investigative thinktank Taxwatch, finds Amazon’s highly profitable cloud computing business is increasingly being indirectly supported by taxpayers through hundreds of billions of dollars in government contracts around the world.
In the UK, Amazon benefited from £250m of government contracts in 2020 – up from zero in 2014 and less than £25m in the four subsequent years according to CICTAR. That was more than 10 times the level of corporation tax paid by the group’s main British subsidiaries that year.
Amazon’s publicly published corporation tax bill in the UK – for its largest subsidiary Amazon UK Services as well as Amazon Digital UK and Amazon Online UK – totalled £22.3m in 2020.
Another £175m of government contracts were booked in 2021. Figures for the corporation tax paid for last year are not yet available.
George Turner, the Taxwatch executive director, said: “Amazon’s history of tax avoidance is very well known but despite this the company has managed to bag a huge increase in revenue from the work it does from government.
“At the very least taxpayers will want some reassurance that their money is spent on companies that are transparent about their tax affairs and demonstrate that they do not use artificial structures to reduce their tax bill.
“The last Queen’s speech announced a new bill to reform government procurement. This would seem to me to be the perfect opportunity for government to ensure
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