One Direction rack up £45.4m profit – and pay more tax than Facebook | Business | The Guardian
http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/n ... x-facebook

They're not totally hateful then.

No but stupid - they need a good accountant

They aren't necessarily stupid, they may feel some sort of moral obligation not to make every possible effort to pay as little tax as they can get away with.

I find it rather hard to believe they have any clue at all what their own tax affairs are. I think it's very much more likely they get a large lump of money drop into their bank accounts every month from the record company/SerCo/whoever and they haven't got the time or inclination to ask any questions, nor would they understand the answers if they did. How much tax 'One Direction' pays is in fact a pretty nonsensical question - it's like asking how much tax specifically the Oxford Street branch of Starbucks pays. The numbers are all mixed together in corporate accounts, it's nothing to do with the individual band members.

I think it's probably fair to suggest Facebook almost certainly doesn't pay as much tax as it should as a corporation but taking two 'finger in the air' numbers and comparing them doesn't really tell us all that much.

Jon

From the article it would appear that the tax was paid by the bands company, 1D Media, of which the 5 band members are the sole named directors. They have an external auditor/accountant who prepared the books and then one of them signed them off on behalf of the 'directors'. Whatever arrangement they have for being paid as individuals isn't disclosed in the article.
So, 1D Media paid roughly the correct amount of corporation tax for the profits they made.

It would be a fairly common arrangement is '1D media' had effectively one customer, which is their record label. It used to be the case for example that lots of footballers were single directors and sole employees of companies instantiated in the Isle of Man and the club the players played for paid the company for that player's services, thus the player benefiting from a favourable tax arrangement. IIRC that scheme was booted not by HMRC but by the football league, which banned 'third party ownership' of player's contracts.

The point about this of course is that the profit 1D media makes is therefore defined not by the total income related to 1D but by the terms of the agreement between 1D media and the record label, which ostensibly does all the work. So yes, they're probably paying exactly as much tax as the company's profits requires but 1D media's profits may have a somewhat loose relation to the amount of money '1 Direction' the band actually brings in. At some point in the future when sales have dropped, the record company will probably pay each member of 1D a lump sum in return for their share of the 1D media business, which will be taxed as capital gains (25%) not income (30-45%).

Also 1D doesn't qualify for many tax breaks. They have no intellectual property.