The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, by Milton Friedman

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This essay is going to discuss how corporate social responsibility is affected by tax avoidance, there will be examples of companies engaging in tax avoidance in 2013 and will include opinions of newspaper articles, directors and chairmen of large enterprises, in order to determine whether or not businesses can be socially responsible and engage in tax avoidance. Corporate social responsibility is when a business's actions affect society and everyone else not involved within the business. The corporation tax is a tax imposed on the profit made by the business and the profit is the difference between sales revenue and costs and this case it would be the net profit which is the pre-tax profit minus the tax. Tax avoidance is when a business reduces taxes, but stays within the law, on the other hand tax evasion is not paying or under-paying tax which breaks the law. In 2011 The European commission defined corporate social responsibility as ‘the responsibility of enterprises for their impacts on society.’(EU commission 2011), It suggests that businesses have to consider the social, environmental and ethical concerns with each business decision as well as satisfy the needs of the stakeholders and shareholders. Engaging in tax avoidance can be seen as an example of not being socially responsible as it would reduce the funds into public goods from the government. This would not only have an impact on society, but the economy as a whole, for example if funds going into public healthcare are reduced, then more workers are likely to be off sick for a longer period of time, resulting in a fall in productivity. Sir Roger believes that avoiding tax is not only detrimental to society, but also to the company itself, as if a business avoids tax or pays a lower tax rate than other companies, (Irvine,2013) their reputation is likely to fall depending on how

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