News Google fined £29 million for tax dodge

Google has found itself on the receiving end of a whopping £28.75M tax bill after the Turkish government investigated its operations within the country.

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2009/11/04/google-fined-29-million-pounds-for-tax-dodg/1

 

Imagine if that figure was in the old Turkish Lira rate!

 

71 Billionish?

 

That's like pocket change to google

 

"If Google does not pay the £28.75M, it could find itself in court, and even banned from operating its services in Turkey for the duration of the hearing."

So if google dont pay turkey will loose access to google?
Whose loosing out more here, my bet is on turkey

 

There's always Bing

 

Grumpy mode on.

'bout time we started enforcing things like this more universally. The UK loses massively in corporation tax based on exactly this sort of dodge. Made eleventy bazillion pounds in the UK last year? Yes we did, y'honour, but we're based in the Cayman Islands so we don't owe you a penny...

I thought I'd never say this, but: go Turkish government.

 

Surely google has paid tax to ireland instead so its not like they are making an extra 30m out of turkeys loss? My bet is that google simply close down their offices in Turkey.

 

Wow looks like one country is in desperate need of money. Same with the EU fining (or trying to) every major corporation. Some of its deserved, but mostly its not.

 

+1

Tax evasion is tax evasion. Nominating a different building as your "offshore" headquarters to avoid paying local tax is evading tax.

 

Loose or lose?

 

No, for a multinational company such a Google it is a perfectly normal to have no registered office in a country in which it is operating to avoid (not evade) tax (which it will pay in Ireland, in this case). The Turkish government's argument is that Google has been profiting in Turkey, not Ireland, from its operation in Turkey, without paying tax which Google presumably refutes. Unless the registered office in Turkey is collecting Turkish AdSense revenue, which I bet it isn't, Google is not liable to pay tax in Turkey.

IMO the Turkish government is simply hoping that Google will take the easy way out, pay the fine, and (if it was even ever at fault) amend its modus operandi to avoid future issues.

 

yeah double taxed.. they do it all the time- if they can tax money that's been taxed.. and then tax the taxed money- you get the point

 

yes, I'm aware it's a common practice, but it's still used by large corporations to avoid paying the taxes in that country. Avoiding and evading are VERY similar. Google clearly has a registered office in Turkey, so no matter how they try and claim it's all going via Ireland, they still have a registered Turkish company (as mentioned in original article) and therefore saying that they're going via Ireland is like saying "nuh-uh, look over there!"

 

And to the Irish government Google probably says: "We are in turkey, so there is the tax going" lol

 

Sounds like a cash strapped country trying to get some easy money from a big cash rich company to me.

If this goes through we will probably see every cash hungry little country targeting what companies they can.

I hope that nothing comes of this.

 

Perhaps the Turkish authorities will take some of google's jewelry, like the italians did with footballer Maradona.

 

Not at all. If the arm of the company registered in Turkey doesn't make a profit there it doesn't need to pay tax there regardless whether its parent company profits from its operations in Turkey or not.

Google has a registered UK office, too, but it pays no taxes here. All the company's profit is funnelled into Ireland where it pays taxes and where, entirely coincidentally I am sure, there are massive tax breaks available to it.

It's precisely because of the legality of tax avoidance that so many companies trading in UK - Play.com being a notable example - have registered offices in the Channel Islands.

This is pretty much my view of what Turkey is doing.

 

You can't tax tax, that would be like stealing your own chips

 

You pay tax on tax every time you buy petrol