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by edanm
3618 days ago
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People think of these issues too much in terms of black and white. You should think of it as a negotiation. Many transactions, even on a smaller scale, are complex, and deciding on the "true value" is often impossible. So the tax authorities are negotiating with Facebook, and Facebook's report is simply its opening offer. You wouldn't consider a salesmen who overpriced his product to be doing something necessarily unethical (assuming they weren't outright committing fraud or otherwise doing something illegal). Disclaimer: Not a lawyer or accountant, and I'm totally generalizing here from other transactions I know more about. I actually know almost nothing specific about the US tax system or this situation with Facebook, I'm trying to convey the general attitude that most companies have. |
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For example, say they invent a new way of compressing jpegs which saves them bandwidth and storage costs. Facebook could report that as costing them money: "Oh, that cost us $120,000 in programmer time to devise and implement".
It's entirely possible that this is true, but it's only half the picture: that new compression algorithm might have saved them twice that or more in bandwidth costs.
In this instance, it's 'efficient' for Facebook to report one part and then conveniently ignore the other. But the question remains is it honest? Surely the value of that technology is somewhere between the cost to create and the costs it's saved?