The bulk of the shortfall almost certainly arose outside the United States, given that the foreign current tax charge was just 9.3% of identified international profits over 2011-20. This would be expected to have a significant impact on the cash taxes paid contribution given 58.9% of total profits and 50.6% of total revenues are identified as being foreign over the decade.

In terms of ranking, none of the Six is an exemplar of responsible tax conduct. However, the degree of irresponsibility and the relative tax contribution made does vary. Amazon has paid just $5.9bn in income taxes this decade, whilst Apple has paid $100.6bn and Microsoft has paid $55.3bn.

Our ranking of 2019 holds: with our ranking of worst tax conduct as follows:

• 1st Amazon
• 2nd Facebook
• 3rd Google / Alphabet
• 4th Netflix
• 5th Apple
• 6th Microsoft

Chief Executive of the Fair Tax Foundation, Paul Monaghan said: “Our analysis of the long-run effective tax rate of the Silicon Six over the decade has found that there continues to be a significant difference between the cash taxes paid and both the headline rate of tax and, more significantly, the reported current tax provisions.”

“These figures provide solid evidence that substantive tax avoidance is still embedded within many large multinationals and nothing less than a root and branch reform of interantional tax rules will remedy the situation. Fortunately, the new US administration has recently light a fire beneath the multilateral discussions that have been slowly progressing under the auspices of the OECD. The Biden-Harris proposals would see many of the incentives underpinning profit-shifting to tax havens removed, and would see the very largest multinationals taxed not just on where subsidiary profits are booked, but where real economic value is derived. This would have a seismic impact on the likes of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft (who have tax dodging hard-wired into their organisational structure), with billions of additional taxes paid across the world.”