Is Starbucks' tax planning and practices setting a bad precedent? The following is a review of the Reuters report on "How Starbucks avoids taxes in the UK": Reuters (2013). Analyze what tax avoidance and evasion are and the issues that impact the ethics of Starbucks' tax planning and practice. Finally, to comment whether Starbucks tax planning is recommended for any other multinational company.2. Tax evasion or avoidance2.1. A review of tax planning Tax avoidance, without prejudice to the following, can be broadly described as the lawful arranging of one's affairs in such a way as to minimize the tax due. The distinction between this and escapism must be clearly understood from the outset. Evasion is, for example, the deliberate submission of false statements, the omission of sales from the trading account, the inflation of expense deduction claims, etc. All the latter can be sanctioned during the investigation and are criminally punishable crimes. The management of your own affairs, referred to above, is permitted unless it falls within the terms of the specific anti-avoidance sections. In my opinion, in the Starbucks scenario, transfer pricing and tax avoidance play a larger role than tax evasion. This is because Starbucks may have undertaken an intentional plan to shift profits from the UK to offshore countries, in the case of the Netherlands, which have a lower tax regime than the UK.2.2. Intentional or not? In other cases it may be an intentional plan to minimize taxes or shift profits abroad by multinational companies. The techniques used to minimize payments are mainly: Tax Planning Tax Avoidance Tax EvasionAs with any tax planning... half the paper... and ethics when doing business. I realized that it is morally wrong and unjust for these large corporations to be motivated by profit at the expense of social responsibility and I cited my home country, Zimbabwe, as an example of how these corporations are exploiting less developing nations development through the transfer of profits. After analyzing all the information and journals, my opinion is that Starbucks is practicing tax planning as a management tool. Reducing costs is important and taxes are one of the largest costs. Multinational corporations often see themselves as one group and these companies operate in different countries but their bottom line is profit. My final diagnosis would be if unbridled and uncontrolled tax planning will have a detrimental effect on many economies globally, hence the growth of business groups such as the OECD policing the ethics and conduct of these companies.