Google Now Pays More Money in EU Fines Than it Pays in Taxes (computing.co.uk)

An anonymous reader writes: Google owner Alphabet has reported annual and quarterly revenues up again, largely on the back of increasing market share in online advertising. The company reported fourth quarter revenues up 22 per cent to $39.28 billion, while annual revenues were up 23 per cent to $136.8 billion. And the company also took the time to separate out "European Commission fines" in its consolidated statements of income in the company's accounts. These increased from $2.7 billion in 2017 to $5.1 billion in 2018, with a further 50 million euro already set to be added to the bill for its first quarter and 2019 accounts, thanks to French data protection authority CNIL.That fine compares to a provision for income taxes of just $4.2 billion for 2018, or 12 per cent of its pre-tax income.

Net income for the full year increased by a 143 per cent from $12.67 billion to $30.74 billion thanks largely to a radically lower provision for income taxes - down from $14.5 billion to just $4.2 billion. The company attributed this tax boost down to the US Tax Act of 2017, which had depressed net income in 2017. This had "resulted in additional tax expense of $9.9 billion in the fourth quarter of 2017, primarily due to the one-time transition tax on accumulated foreign subsidiary earnings and deferred tax effects", the company claimed in its earnings release.

Comments

Tax Breaks to Europe

[sdinfoserv]

So as the US Federal Government goes deeper into debt to fund Corporate Tax Breaks, the EU gladly hands down fines to collect the dollars those same companies are NOT paying in infrastructure reinvestment, average worker wages and benefits.
What part of Reaganomics "trickledown" lead to raising taxes on the middle class 11 times in Reagan's 8 years are lost on people. Stop buying the "trickledown" lies.

Follow the law or whine louder GOP INCEL faggots.

[Anonymous Coward]

ANOTHER contender for world's dumbest faggot everybody! Another round of applause, another inbred moron thinks Europe can't have their own privacy laws. You can't make this stuff up, Republicans literally are this retarded now.

They think they make the rules in Europe too, lol. Pity the inbred morons, they don't understand why they can't be kings and instead are worthless uneducated pawns.

Re:Follow the law or whine louder GOP INCEL faggot

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it's not provable unless you delve, and you're not doing that. However it's also irrelevant because they have the right to have laws! Google plays in their country's sandbox, not the other way around. Google != Sovereign.

If they were really not wanting to pay the fines they'd ADDRESS THE VIOLATIONS OF LAW, which wouldn't be impossible and everyone else has to do it also, OR STOP OPERATING IN EUROPE. Them's the breaks kid.

They choose to pay. They make massive profits anyway. Now if they only fix their models to protect user privacy over their multifaceted interconnected empire of data collection "for advertising" -wink, THEY WOULD BE ALL SET.

Stop apologizing for a massive profit just because a country wanted to enforce their laws SLIGHTLY in the process. It's retarded. And no, I'm 100% not trolling.

That idiot windbourne literally seems to think EU can't have different laws than the US, or what Google would prefer. Fuck him back to a Lego movie, he's an idiot. Completely not trolling, 100% serious.

Capiche?

Re:article is not very complete

[swillden]

GDPR violations mostly.

I think very little was GDPR-related. As I recall, 2017's big fine ($2.5B) was for putting Google Shopping ads in Google Search results, and 2018's ($5B) was for bundling GApps with Android.

Re:Yup.

[Computershack]

they are NOT being fined for taxes. They are being fined for all sorts of BS that their own companies do, but it is not illegal.

Yeah actually in the EU it is illegal which is why they got fined.