Executives from Starbucks Corp., Amazon.com Inc. and Google Inc. came under attack Monday from British lawmakers who accused the U.S. companies of using complex accounting methods to reduce their tax liabilities in the U.K.
Parliament's Public Accounts Committee questioned statements of how much profit the companies were making in Britain. Starbucks Chief Financial Officer Troy Alstead was told his assertion that the coffee chain continually made losses in Britain "just doesn't ring true," while Amazon's director of public policy, Andrew Cecil, was "not credible" when he declined to give details of sales generated in the U.K.
"Your entire economic activity is in the U.K., yet you pay no tax here," Margaret Hodge, the opposition Labour Party lawmaker who heads the committee, said during an exchange with Cecil at the hearing in London yesterday. "You are not putting enough tax back into the economy."
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