Amazon has been accused ‘tactically releasing’ details about its financial dealings in the UK as it faces ongoing questions about its tax affairs
Online giant Amazon cherry-picked details of its financial affairs as it boasted about paying more than £1billion in UK taxes.
The US heavyweight, founded by billionaire Jeff Bezos, revealed that it raked in revenues of more than £29billion in the UK in 2024, equivalent to more than £900 a second.
The colossal figure – around £2billion up on the prior year – includes everything from its gigantic shopping arm to Amazon Web Services, its cloud computing arm used by thousands of businesses and the government to store and process data.
But the firm is a lot more secretive about exactly where that money comes from, and stubbornly refuses to say what profit it made in the UK.
In an online post, it disclosed that it paid just over £1billion worth of direct taxes in 2024, for example corporation tax, the digital services tax and business rates. The figure was up from £932million in 2023.
The £1billion of tax equates to just 3.44% of Amazon’s turnover in the UK. In addition, the company said it collected £4.7billion in other taxes, including VAT on sales and employee national insurance.
The figures given in the blog cover 20 UK-based entities, including Amazon Web Services – which runs its vast fulfilment centres – AWS, Audible, IMDb and Whole Foods.
Amazon’s secrecy contrasts with other big companies, including retailers, that are listed in the UK and required to disclose far more details about there tax affairs.
Paul Monaghan, chief executive of the Fair Tax Foundation: “Amazon are once again tactically releasing their total tax contribution calculation to distract attention away from the pitifully low levels of corporation tax that have been contributed by Amazon UK Services over recent years. The public are not interested in how much VAT Amazon has collected and passed on to the Government.
“They want to know how much corporation tax they pay in the UK. They want to know how much profit they actually account for in the UK from the £29billion of revenue they collect here. One can only surmise that the lack of transparency is connected to the sizeable chunk of UK revenue that is still shunted to the historically ‘loss-making’ subsidiary in Luxembourg.”
He urged the government to force companies such as Amazon to publish a country-by-country breakdown of the corporation tax they pay, adding: “parliament passed tax transparency legislation mandating this in 2016, but it has yet to be enacted.”
Faiza Shaheen, executive director at Tax Justice UK, said: “Like many companies, Amazon only discloses a small amount of information about their profits and the taxes they pay in the UK.
“This makes it hard to scrutinise whether they’re paying their fair share, or taking advantage of loopholes and failures in the UK and international tax system. However, it is telling that their tax bill has barely increased over recent years despite enormous growth in revenues.
“At a time when the government needs to raise more revenue, small businesses are struggling, and everyday people continue to see their incomes squeezed, tax rules need to be rewired to ensure corporate giants pay the right taxes in the places they do highly profitable business.”
Amazon claimed it had become one of just a handful of companies to pay more than £1billion a year in direct taxes, with Tesco the only other retailer. It also insisted that it ranks in the top 10 largest UK taxpayers and plans to invest £40billion here over the next three years.
In the blog, it also said: “Our total permanent workforce of more than 75,000 employees makes us one of the top 10 private sector employers in the UK.
“Our employees are spread across the UK in a variety of corporate and technology roles in Amazon and Amazon Web Services, including software development, product management, and engineering, as well as jobs in the operations teams in our fulfilment centres, sort centres, and delivery stations.”