French IT firm Atos, the company paid hundreds of millions to carry out the brutal Work Capability Assessment, paid no Corporation Tax in the UK last year the Daily Telegraph has revealed.
The company, who also have a string of other public sector contracts and have recently been invited to bid to part-run George Osborne’s mass workfare scheme, claim to have made no profit in the UK in 2012. Yet boss of the company, Thierry Breton, was recently discovered to have been awarded a £280,000 pay rise during the same period – meaning his annual salary package is now worth an astonishing £2,329,250.
Atos are not the only company with their snouts in the public sector trough who have given nothing back. The notorious and allegedly fraud ridden G4S also paid no Corporation Tax in the last year. According to The Telegraph, the company appear to justify this by saying they paid around £400million in PAYE-related taxes. This is a common excuse from the bosses of tax dodging multi-nationals and it is contemptible, as if it is them, and not their employees, who are paying this tax.
The figures came to light after a National Audit Office (NAO) report which revealed that the four biggest public sector contractors – Atos, G4S, Serco and Capita – received around £6.6 billion from public sector contracts in 2012. To place this figure in context, that is around one and a half times the annual bill for the main unemployment benefit Jobseekers Allowance. Almost half a billion of that came from contracts with the DWP which merely exist to bully and harass those out of work and little else. All these contracts have been a disaster, from the bungled Work Capability Assessment which has seen hundreds of thousands of wrong decisions over-turned on appeal, to the equally bodged Work Programme which is performing worse at getting people into work than doing nothing at all.
Osborne’s latest workfare plans alone are expected to cost another third of a billion pounds. Still these companies are being handed huge sums of tax payer’s money. Much of that will end up in the pockets of bosses like Thierry Breton. Some will be squandered on incompetence such as the Olympic Security farce. If the investigations into Serco and G4S’ probation contracts are anything to go by then some of it will be stolen outright. And now it seems almost nothing will come back to the tax payer as they whinge that they haven’t made enough money and so can’t afford to pay tax.
Claimants who take a few quid off the state to stay alive due to sickness, parenthood, unemployment or disability are immediately judged to be benefit scroungers. Steal a couple of billion and the cunts will probably give you a knighthood.
The NAO Report can be read at: http://www.nao.org.uk/report/memorandum-role-major-contractors-delivery-public-services/
