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France Seeking $1.76 Billion In Back Taxes From Google (reuters.com)
An anonymous reader writes: According to a Reuters insider, France is seeking 1.6 billion euros in back taxes from Google, dwarfing what the United Kingdom recently agreed to pay. France apparently has no interest in striking the same 'sweetheart tax' deal that put the UK into a critical light when it revealed that the search giant would pay only 130 million pounds of tax, a $181.18 million settlement, for over 10 years in multi-billion dollar trade in the UK.
Just as an aside, my Father was at Dunkirk in 1940 in the BEF and had nothing but praise for the French. Americans joke about them being "Cheese eating surrender monkeys", but if the French 2nd Army hadn't fought on alone and unsupported for 2 days, my Dad probably would have been captured by the Germans, and the War might have been lost right there.
You may think it is plenty. The rest of the world has had a gutful of large companies hiding profits in tax havens to leech money out of countries. The taxes they pay are a tiny fraction of what they should be paying and no this isn't just a google problem.
That's revenue. You have to subtract operating expenses. Google's profit per quarter is about $4 billion.
France has a population of 66 million people. Assume 2/3 of those use Google (the rest being too young or luddites) and you get 44 million users. Figure Google has a billion users, so France accounts for 4.4% of that.
If you look at Google's growth profile, it more or less forms a triangle going back to about 2005. So assuming constant profit margin, total Google profit has been about $4 billion * 4 quarters * 11 years / 2 = $88 billion.
4.4% of $88 billion is $3.87 billion. So France wants to tax Google at a $1.76 / $3.87 = 45.5% tax rate.
That still doesn't explain why more than half of American voters selected George W. Bush having already experienced four years of his presidency, nor why so many Republicans are currently choosing Donal Trump.