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Google's 'Dutch Sandwich' Shielded 16 Billion Euros From Tax (bloomberg.com)
Google moved 15.9 billion euros ($19.2 billion) to a Bermuda shell company in 2016, saving at least $3.7 billion in taxes that year, regulatory filings in the Netherlands show. From a report: Google uses two structures, known as a "Double Irish" and a "Dutch Sandwich," to shield the majority of its international profits from taxation. The setup involves shifting revenue from one Irish subsidiary to a Dutch company with no employees, and then on to a Bermuda mailbox owned by another Ireland-registered company. The amount of money Google moved through this tax structure in 2016 was 7 percent higher than the year before, according to company filings with the Dutch Chamber of Commerce dated Dec. 22 and which were made available online Tuesday.
This dovetails nicely with all the "We love social justice!" TV commercials that Google was running during football games this past weekend.
Is that perfectly-legal tax-avoidance strategies like this one aren't available to lower and middle class employees.
I get that these are loopholes, which means that they are abusing laws that are written poorly (or intentionally), but how does this type of tax sheltering not represent corporate fraud?
There has to be a point where abusing a loophole is a crime rather than creative accounting.
nt
Since Alphabet, their new motto is: "Do the right thing."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_be_evil
But I think they should change it one more time.
How about: "Fuck you all."
Very altruistic :)
Just like Apple and Facebook they have a fuzzy warm image and promote the idea of everyone getting along just fine, but when it comes to paying what they owe, fuck that and FUCK YOU.
Fuck Sergei and Larry,
Fuck Time Cooke (And Steve Jobs)
Fuck Zuckerberg
This story posted right after one about "Big Tech" working with the government.
How about you pay your fucking taxes first?
If the law allows them to do this then what are you complaining about? Don't like it? Change the laws.
So wait... It's not only a bad thing when Apple does this? Good to know.
Don't a lot of companies other then Apple and Google do this? Wasn't this "news" years ago?
According to the Orange President Google and all others sitting on a pile of cash overseas will now bring all that money back to the US after the tax reform bil...
"Double Irish" and "Dutch Sandwich" both sound like something you'll immediately regret looking up at UrbanDictionary.
In the US, the preamble to our Constitution does a pretty good job of laying out roles and limits of government. It makes an explicit distinction between justice and domestic tranquility, which the government is to "establish" and "insure," respectively, the common defense (military), which the government is to "provide for," and the general welfare, which the government is only to "promote," not "provide for."
Where's the doodle for tax evasion?
I mean eventually that money gets spent, if not this year then next year. Right?
I'm not stating a strong opinion or preference here, I'm just saying this is what I think is happening and I may be wrong.
I'd love for someone to explain this to me in simple terms (seriously).
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain... time... to... die...
It's really about whose property it is. If you take the view that the economy and money belongs first to the government, and people and corporations are only allowed to keep what portion of their own income the government permits, then every time the laws are used or adjusted so that they pay less in taxes, you see it as a "giveaway" to the rich or to corporations. In this case, it's the responsibility of individuals to live within whatever remaining means the government allows them.
But, if you take the view that government is by the consent of the governed, and the money belongs first to the individuals, then you see it as the right of individuals and corporations to come together to change the laws to ensure that the government only takes that portion of their property and income that they decide to permit. In this case, it's the responsibility of government to function within whatever means the people allow it. That's the true Libertarian utopia.
Glad to know that Google employs competent accountants and tax lawyers. Every euro kept out of government hands is a good thing.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I honestly fail to see what's in it for Jews? Seriously. Why would a "people" (and we'll talk about that in a sec) would do something that cause the entire planet to hate them even more than they already do?
And about "people", what on earth makes you think "Jews" are as organized as the Jew haters are trying to make it seem? It so happens that Jews are probably the least organized people on earth. There's hundreds of streams & communities, they all disagree with each other, are spread over the globe, and even in Israel you can see huge disparity in opinions, internal conflict, etc.
I think if you educate yourself on the issue, you'll realize why linking Jews to 9/11 in any way, is simply absurd and stupid (and simply driven by an evil Jew hating agenda).
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain... time... to... die...
You don't need tax breaks when you manage to avoid paying any taxes at all. In the realm of social justice, this whole thing is obscene. It doesn't benefit society, and it certainly doesn't create jobs.
People at lower incomes generally aren't paying taxes in the first place, so they have nothing to avoid. In the United States, according to the Office of Management and Budget, the top 25 percent of income earners pay 86.7 percent of all income taxes paid. The bottom HALF of income earners combined pay only 2.7% of all income taxes collected.
(Source: https://www.lombardiletter.com/top-20-percent-pay-95-percent-tax/20757/)
If we want to talk about who is avoiding income taxes, it's that lower half. Even low income earners ought to pull at least some of their weight, and currently that's not happening. It's why upper income earners get so mad every time people talk about lowering their taxes as a "giveaway to the rich."
The continued machinations that everyone has gotten into with respect to taxing profits feels just like the epicycles used in the heliocentric models -- continued added complexity to make something work that at base doesn't make sense.
At base, the truth is that profit is an interpretive value. It's not a basic arithmetic concept like gross revenue or net revenue -- it's a derived value that requires subjective judgment to assign to the inputs. As such, you can create more and more complicated rules that never really continues. Like epicycles, the corrections and adjustments continue forever.
It would seem totally logical that the simplest and least-subject-to-perversion method of taxation would be to chose to tax a value that requires the absolute minimum subjective interpretation: either a gross revenue tax or a consumption tax. Both can be made arbitrarily progressive and both are virtually impossible to game.
Instead we go on and on trying to tax an elusive concept . . .
r-right... ?
(plot twist - captcha is 'revenue')
Google: tax cuts for me, my friend ... for me, not for thee :) Social justice! or something!
Your implication is that our society couldn't organize those benefits without a violently imposed monopoly called "government". Well, that's disputable.
People more or less gave their money voluntarily Google; in my mind, that makes Google far more worthy of that purchasing power than any government could possibly be—it's better to keep the power to make decisions for society's resources in the hands of the people who have actually and objectively proven themselves good at making profitable allocations of society's resources. Google made wealth; they didn't just take it at the point of a gun.
Your implication is that our society couldn't organize those benefits without a violently imposed monopoly called "government". Well, that's disputable.
Theoretically, perhaps, but history has no examples in your favor. At least not on a scale of 4-digit populations.
it's better to keep the power to make decisions for society's resources in the hands of the people who have actually and objectively proven themselves good at making profitable allocations of society's resources.
Disagree, there's nothing inherently good or helpful to society about making a profit. The EITC made profits. Gilded age companies made profits. Microsoft in the 90s made huge profits. Google's profit helps nobody except those at Google.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
If the organization of your society depends fundamentally on a violently imposed monopoly, then your society is not yet civilized. All you've got is just another warlord, albeit one that may be quite tame most of the time. Taxation is an ancient, Old World, barbaric homage paid to the Dear Leader; it's a sign of naive societal infrastructure, and sloppy, lazy thinking.
As a civilized person, you should delight in trying to figure out how as much of society as possible can be organized around voluntary interaction, not submission to a coercive Big Business that calls itself "government".
and it's a real political theory/movement. It's currently being used by the American Republican party to argue for cuts to our national pension program (Social Security) and our Single Payer healthcare system for people over 65 (Medicare).
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..my ass.
Organization? You must be joking..
He just loads up his trash bags in his pickup, and drives it to his company's dumpster; it makes a lot more sense for everyone involved—it's really silly for a massive dump-truck to go around to each person's house just to pick up one or 2 bags of trash each week.
People are stupid. Governments tend to enshrine their stupidity.
If there were no government-funded firemen, insurance company's would have long ago cajoled people into building homes with sprinkler systems, for example. Instead, we rely on former high-school-football-stars driving around in a ridiculously big red truck. Stupid. STUPID.
The best part about all of this is it was the US State Department's idea to set up Ireland as a tax haven. Back in the late 40's when Ireland was basically broke, the US and UK got together with them to figure out how to fix their economy. The US brought up a bunch of ideas, and setting up a tax haven was one of them. So Ireland went ahead and did it.
So it's a bit suspect when the US congress calls CEOs onto the floor and lambastes them for taking advantage of something the US told Ireland to do.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
Democracy is just one kind a logistical system for measuring what people want.
Well, there's a far better, finer-grained, much more accurate system for doing that: The Free Market. It's so sophisticated, that it produces signals for people's needs and desires without them even realizing it; this phenomenon is known as "The Invisible Hand", or "Evolution by variation and selection"—there's no need for a Dear Leader; there's no need for an Intelligent Designer.
Under capitalism, you "vote" every time you allocate your resources to this or to that; if your "vote" was profitable for society, then you are rewarded by society with even more decision-making power; and, if your "vote" was a negative for society, then you are punished with less decision-making power, thereby saving society from your bad ideas.
You want real accountability? The answer is Capitalism, not some violently imposed monopoly that decrees its income at the point of a gun.
Non sequitur of the day.
Organization? You must be joking..
Sounds like HATE SPEECH to me. Nip off your Nuts. Ya Wot? You already bred? We can fix that and Nip off the Nuts of your children too, and tie the tubes of the females.
That'll bloody get your sodding hatred out of the gene pool once and fer all!
History is replete with examples in my favor; free market principles are what have made mankind so ridiculously wealthy, despite the parasite that is "government".
The Devil's greatest trick was convincing people He doesn't exist; the Government's greatest trick was convincing people that "profit" is a dirty word that has no solid connection with societal benefit.
An allocation of resources is either profitable, or it isn't. Voluntary trade means that both sides have profited—otherwise, there would have been no deal. In contrast, a coercive allocation of resources (the kind around which every government is founded) does not benefit from this characteristic, which is why socialist regimes always degenerate into dysfunctional breadlines with capitalist black markets doing most of the heavy lifting.
I would expect a company the size of Google to hire an army of tax accountants and lawyers to do this, but one thing that I think people overlook is that businesses in general get a huge advantage over typical wage-earners in the US tax system.
It drives me crazy when I hear small business owners whining about how expensive it is to do business and how they're being taxed to death. I'd love to see what entity owns their house, their cars, and incurs all their personal expenses...in almost all cases, these are easily passed through to the corporation or other business structure they own. All the complaints about high tax rates ring hollow when you can avoid it by offsetting revenue with expenses. Let's say you have $100K in revenue and maybe $20K in legitimate business expenses. Rent your house out as a place of business...that's thousands in rent, and of course your business needs cars, computers, business-related travel expenses, etc...and all of a sudden you're reporting a loss instead of a profit. Even better, if it's a corporation, you issue yourself a W-2 for a tiny salary, legitimizing the corporation's existence and further reducing your tax liability by paying tax on the salary at the personal rate.
The only way to fix this would be to switch to a consumption tax, or cut out every single deduction and charge a lower rate...but companies have already purchased their tax laws and aren't going to give them up without a fight.
Some firm never make a profit. Some stays in the black, barely. A scheme of taxing gross revenue would kill such fledgling firms and increase considerably joblessness by making those not viable anymore. A regressive consumption tax predominantly hit those with the lowest income, they are like VAT tax , tax on sales, and making them progressive tax makes it difficult to implement, possibly adding infrastructure which do not exist today, adding a burden on the state. Really, there is a good reason to avoid consumption tax and gross tax as opposed to revenue tax.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Who pays corporate taxes? Answer: the corporations. And who owns the corporations? Answer: the shareholders.
Why don't we just tax the shareholders and skip the corporate tax?
Yes, we're not yet civilized. And then? Would we become civilized by just pretending that we are?
Almost anything depends on the state's monopoly on legal use of violence -- you wouldn't be able to run a lemonade stand without the ugly threat of institutional violence looming large in the mind of the nice passers-by toying with ideas of despoiling you, or just beating you up for the adrenaline kick.
If I moved a ton of money around in phony companies someone would just take it all and scream "Drug Money".
Why doesn't the same plan work here?!? I can't even put money in my dad's account cause 'money laundering' anymore. Can't we just take it and make them prove it isn't dirty money. If they have to file taxes to do it...well...
I will create two Dutch companies with no employees and then will move my income to one of them and then transfer that money to a Bermuda mailbox owned by the other company. I would report zero income to the IRS and nobody will mind it at all. Why doesn't everyone do this? Oh wait, someone's knocking at the door. BRB.
Much better to pay protection money to the local gangsters.
This utopia where you are left to do whatever you want without interference does not exist.
We all know that Apple is the embodiment of 'evil' and Google is ... wait... Oh shit.
Google is as bad if not worse than Apple.
Google is Big Brother so if anyone tries to stop them, I'm sure they have lots of nice juicy bits on politicians all over the world. So any move to stop them will result in blackmail (or worse)
Nothing will happen to Google and we will all go back to hating only apple.
But does it say we dont give a fuck where, you still get taxed?
is the upkeep on our Empire (aka "Defense Spending") and keeping old people alive (SS and Medicare). Here's a nice, well researched write up. I say 1/4 because another 4% is vetrans, and it's only that high because of our Empire...
Medicare has absurdly high payout rates vs it's overhead. There's virtually no waste there and what little there is comes from laws passed by right wing legislatures (Republicans and Blue-Dog Dems) that prevent the government from negotiating lower prices.
Now, that 25% isn't anything to sneeze at, but it's also spread out over 9 categories, with one of the categories being 'Remainder'. You're going to find a lot of that is stuff like the farm subsidies that keep our food supply consistent, the FDA, Patent office, FBI, etc, etc. Things you probably don't want to cut.
My point is, government isn't _nearly_ as wasteful as you think it is. It sounds crazy when the government wastes $1 billion until you realize that's just not a lot of money to a country of 350 million people with a $57k per capita GDP
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Like you would know anything about that as a Russian propagandist?
Get real, Ivan.
Greed
Hypocrites.
That's all that it takes. Why it didn't happen? Because of the influence of evaders on governments.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
There are three cups, upside down on the table, each one labelled on the inside.
The first cup is labelled "avoidance", the second cup is labelled "evasion", and the third up is labelled "shell game".
And they all wing around the table so rapidly only a meth-addicted Rain Man could tell them apart from any intermediate camera angle.
We should be riding around in our own personal larger on the inside time machines by now. Something went wrong. This is not the great and bountiful human empire.
That's fine, but it's Ireland's policy to fix.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
Don't miss the point here, kids ... every single fucking multinational company is ran by crooks and thieves, who go to great pains to make billions and then hide it and ensure they don't pay taxes on it.
All CEOs are crooks.
And people want to give the fucking corporations even more tax breaks? For what, greedy ass shareholder value while countries get robbed of billions in taxes.
Fuck that, eat the goddamned rich.
Contract enforcement and/or dispute resolution are services, like any other; they can be implemented in the market as well.
Besides the fact that most people are good natured, it is also the case that most people will defend themselves with extreme violence.
Caveat Emptor.
Nobody said "without interference". It's just that such interference, being a service like any other, must itself be implemented in the market place.
Society is an iterative phenomenon.
Anyway, enjoy your captivity.
CAPTCHA: savages
Worse than Double Dutch?
And is their Dutch Sandwich cooked in a Dutch Oven? Yech!
You realize the rich aren't paying taxes. This is exactly how Trump wants it. And the GOP is singing a song of trickle down economics like Trump was making it rain cash.
Not only that but the shareholder ALSO gets to pay tax on dividends as well as tax on capital gains.
You are left with this: Shareholders own the company. The company pays tax on profits. Then the company distributes those profits back to the shareholders (dividends)......where they are taxed a 2nd time.
This is why many people advocate elimination of the corporate tax. It's pretty obvious to see why.
... a "Dutch oven"? I've always heard it called a Dutch oven.
You may be thinking of the phrase "shit sandwich."