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Google Settles Decade-Long Tax Dispute In UK (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Alphabet, Inc., parent company to Google, has agreed to pay $185 million to settle UK taxes going back to 2005. The company has also agreed to adopt a new approach to taxes in the UK going forward. While this is a sizeable figure, many believe it is too little, and constitutes a sweetheart deal between the government and Google. Matt Brittin, the President of EMEA Business and Operations for Google, was a participant in a televised hearing today in which UK lawmakers questioned the $185 million settlement. He stated, "We find ourselves in the position where we are paying the tax that the tax authorities told us to pay."
can expect crawl-up-your-arse audits for the next lifetime. 2.5% tax is a fucking insult, compounded by the chancellor getting free fucking tickets to the Superbowl paid for by... FUCKING GOOGLE!
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
The thing that's new about the story was the grilling Google's EMEA boss got in front of a parliamentary select committee yesterday and what came out of that.
Whatever you think about large corps and taxes, that guy got absolutely slaughtered and it's incredible Google sent anyone that inept to represent themselves as it's done Google more harm than good on the tax front.
The MPs basically asked him why Google has only paid 3% tax for the period when the rate is 20%, to which he replied that they do pay the 20% owed by law. They ask him on what figure the 20% was paid given that the tax paid only amounts to 3% of declared profit and he simply couldn't answer. This means he's either incredibly inept in that he was wholly unprepared to answer an obvious question on the topic at hand, or Google is afraid to admit how it comes to it's profit figure because it's still hiding something that may get it in bother - if it was legal and in good standing, why hide your profit figure that you're paying tax on?
He was also asked if he felt the £130 million was fair, to which the Google guy replied yes, and then the MP followed up with the question "If it's fair, why didn't you pay it in the first place?", for which he had no answer. He was later asked a similar question as to whether he agreed the £130 million was legally owed, to which he answered yes.
He claimed there's no legal mechanism to pay more tax in the UK and therefore he can't, to which it was pointed out that that's simply false.
The problem is, even if you're of the belief that it's okay for companies like Google to only pay what is legally required, rather than what is intended, Google's exec here twice said the £130 million bill was both acceptable and legally owed, which inherently means that he has now admitted that Google didn't simply carry out tax avoidance, but carried out outright tax evasion.
Which is why in my opinion the whole large corporation tax debacle isn't as clear as many have argued - the often parroted large corporation line of "We pay what we legally have to" is slowly unraveling, and it's becoming increasingly clear that large corps haven't even been paying what they legally have to, let alone what the law intended (even if badly). The fact is that in many jurisdictions where this is an issue it's simply not clear that these companies are merely only engaging in legal avoidance rather than illegal evasion whatever the companies themselves may now claim. At least one corporation, Google, has now admitted that it carried out tax evasion by accepting that it did in fact legally owe these £130 million in taxes but previously chose not to pay them.
The question now really is what happens with all the other big players. In many ways Google may have gotten off easy by going first, because there's more pressure than ever for government to more tightly scrutinise these deals and to charge penalty costs (which Google was let off from). Google got off lightly for committing tax evasion in the UK, but it's not clear due to the backlash from that whether all the others will get off so lightly. We already know there will at least be some others given that Amazon and Starbucks' tax deal with Luxembourg has already previously been found to have been illegal.