It would be great if Amazon paid more taxes – but it's the UK government's fault that there are tax loopholes, not theirs

Amazon pays it taxes; but only in the sense that no one, not even its bitterest critics, has accused it of acting illegally in its dealings with HM Revenue and Customs. Otherwise there is common consent that Amazon doesn’t pay what could be considered a fair share of its earnings to certain nations, including Britain, where it conducts some profitable business. That is the point.

To quantify the issue is, at first glance, simple. Amazon’s UK tax bill looks light indeed when placed next to its sales revenues. By the time the tax accountants at Amazon HQ had finished with the books, and had agreed with HMRC to have some tax deferred, Amazon handed over a mere £4.5m to the Exchequer. By contrast, it sold the British a total of close to £2bn worth of goods over the same period.

But of course, gross revenues are not a sensible basis for any kind of taxation. Vast revenues can be generated by, say transnational carmaking groups, because of the volumes involved, but if each and every vehicle is sold at a loss there will be no profits to tax; quite the opposite, indeed.

Amazon does not make a loss on everything it sells, far from it, but does claim to be a low-margin business, which carries some weight. The firm also uses, perfectly legitimately, a tax break designed to encourage share ownership. So it has offered its staff shares in Amazon partly in lieu of wages – tax efficient for all and, at a time when the share price continues to climb, something of a bonus for its hard working staff.

But still. The tax treatment of Amazon and companies like it remains deeply unsatisfactory – because it favours web based retailers to a grotesque degree. Their traditional competitors on the high street, lumbered as they are with retail premises and associated overheads, suffer an immediate hurdle to staying in business. This is a product of official incompetence rather than corporate greed as such. Few companies, or individuals, volunteer to pay more tax than the authorities ask of them.

Thus, groups such as the struggling House of Fraser or the profitable Marks & Spencer, as well as small other booksellers and tech stores in direct competition with Amazon, face business rate bills 10 times the size of Amazon’s, as well as much larger corporation tax bills. We have an analogue Treasury and HMRC trying to deal with the digital age – and failing.

Though potentially vexed, this disparity is something the chancellor could address in his next Budget, or at least make a start on. It is not something that he needs international support or a European directive to remedy. It is entirely in the hands of the Treasury to place traditional and e-retailers on a similar fiscal basis.

In the wider context of corporation tax for these new behemoths, there is a need for international coordination. When giant companies can themselves go “shopping” for the most easygoing tax authorities levying the most favourable of tax bills, then of course they will do so.

If some tax jurisdictions, including in the EU, see fit to allow companies to “bank” fees for intellectual copyright, with the effect of reducing profits and the tax bill in the next country, then they deprive their neighbours of vital funds to protect public services, and invite others to undercut them in turn.

Hence the downward spiral, the race to the bottom, in taxation and regulation we have seen in recent decades as globalisation has ground down national sovereignty. In the process the main losers are the public and the only winners are these vastly rich and powerful companies.

No doubt, Amazon is an efficient and innovative business. Many millions of customers are very satisfied with the services it offers. Even in a world where the tax system was modernised and rationalised, Amazon would probably still grow its sales at the expense of the high street. You can even make a case that the extraordinary, some would deem obscene, wealth of Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder, is a just reward for his entrepreneurship. He is a product of the free market economy; and at a fortune of $112bn (£86bn), the world’s richest man, having overtaken Bill Gates. He is also, however, a product of a weak international tax system that has allowed him to run rings around it, in a way that almost everyone else on the planet cannot. That feels rigged. It is not fair.