Google Ordered Back To UK Parliament To "Explain Itself" Following Investigation

DavidGilbert99 writes "Last November Matt Brittin, Google's European chief gave a pretty convincing account of himself as he tried to explain why Google wasn't paying more tax in the UK. All the sales staff were based in Ireland apparently and the UK-based staff were there just to promote the platform for advertisers. Great. Nothing to see here. Move on please. Well, actually there is a little more to the story, as an investigation by Reuters has discovered. There are many sales staff in the UK with titles and responsibilities curiously close to what most people would call sales staff and as a result Mr. Brittin will once again have to face Margaret Hodge and the PAC to explain just what is happening."

Comments

The government wants its cut

[udachny]

Eric Schmidt just 10 days ago said that Google pays everything it owes in UK. Of-course there shouldn't be any income taxes in the first place, UK or US or any other country, all of these income tax schemes must be demolished, but hey, that would be real austerity IF the government also was cut in process, not just putting the difference on its credit card or printing it.

Real austerity is cutting all unprofitable spending, all government spending and then allowing the private sector to keep their taxes, because the government spending is reduced to almost nothing. THAT would be austerity.

Instead all these nonsensical countries raise taxes and grow government spending and call that 'austerity' and then complain that austerity doesn't work. Of-course it doesn't work when you don't do it.

Back to Google, they should just bribe a few politicians to get them off their case.

Re:It usually works like this

[philip.paradis]

The universally sad thing about Libertarians is that they don't undertand that power always fills a vacuum: the less powerful you make democratic government, the more powerful you make privately owned businesses.

That's the point. Nothing is misunderstood, aside from your misunderstanding of economics. You probably also suffer from an unfortunate tendency to view markets with blinders and therefore see large players dominating various fields at any given snapshot in time as a bad thing, but without the ability to see that such domination is still better than the alternative of unskilled bureaucratic control that is necessarily comprised of similarly flawed human beings with no real accountability to speak of in the same examined period, with those two options being an exclusive OR proposition, and without understanding that disruptive forces periodically come along in said markets to upset the entire deal in a constructive manner.

In other words, you probably aren't somebody who effects large scale change in the first place, and happily you're not somebody who will wind up having any real influence on things in any event. You probably think you speak for the masses in some respect, but the truth of the matter is the masses don't even know what they truly believe beyond their own personal lives. This has always been true, and will always be true as long as economic scarcity exists. You might as well stop wasting your time concerning yourself with such things and just live your life.

TLDR: This is how the human species operates. Get used to it and relax.

Re:Google's real motto

[udachny]

It should be a universal motto. Nobody should be forced to give up any amount of their income.

Tax transactions, that's where taxation belongs. Tax heads, you can impose a direct (proportioned in USA) tax.

Taxing income, profits, wealth accumulation, savings is:
1. theft of private property, so it's immoral.
2. bad for the economy, as instead of investing more, people are more concerned with ways to avoid taxes.

Re:It usually works like this

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Tthe quote may not be from him, but this whole argument that government is why things are great is specious arrogancy.

Free people hire it to secure their rights so they can go on to pursue their own ends, and time and again this is what makes a nation great.

Obama's statement, "You didn't build that (company)!", which he mostly backed off of, was the opposite of his observed trend. Legion are the nations with roads that don't do squat economically, because of rampant kickbacks, illegal or legal (massive taxation or other burden).