Starbucks Gives To Charity.

In a move that has accountants lost in admiration the multi-national company Starbucks has offered HMRC a £10 million voluntary donation. We asked a Starbucks executive for his view; "Starbucks have always donated to deserving causes and there are few more deserving causes than HMRC who have been forced to go cap-in-hand to scrape enough money together to pay its own inspectors. It's tragic - on a par with any famine in Africa or any typhoon-struck third world Caribbean country. We genuinely felt sorry for them what with government cuts, creative accountancy practices and political indifference. We've seen cases of very highly-trained inspectors, some of whom actually have GCSE's in Maths, without the requisite number of beads on their abacus and struggling to catch all the plumbers out there avoiding tax. Of course we don't regard our donation as a tax payment. We've actually recorded it as a charity donation which, as you know, we can offset against our actual tax liability. We recognise that we have a responsibility to those communities that we rip off with over-priced coffee and thought it only fair to dip into the petty cash and throw them a bone. We hope that our gesture might usher in a new era where multinationals like ourselves can decide for ourselves what tax, if any, we should pay. To be honest we've been doing exactly that for years, but this is the first time anyone has noticed. Mind you we wouldn't advocate this for everyone - especially the peasants who pay their taxes though PAYE."