News Google fined £29 million for tax dodge

It may be legal, but it's wrong, and the law should be changed to accommodate it. It's becoming more and more of an issue with ever greater globalisation. Under these rules it's only sheer practicality that stops a company setting up in a state where there's no corporation tax, making billions worldwide, and not paying anyone a penny, despite benefiting directly from the taxpayer-funded infrastructure of the places where it does business. This is not right and I think it's being shown to be not right more and more in cases like this.

The entire concept of setting up a corporate subsidy that you will intentionally cause to never ever make a profit is beyond ludicrous, and an obvious tax dodge. God forbid I suggest that the current government enact yet more laws, but an alteration of the rules to claw back at least some of this money would seem in order. You need to be a bit careful so as not to make the UK an impossible place to run big business, but at the end of the day this is why greater world (not European, world) harmonisation of this sort of law is a good idea.

 

If the law was changed then they would just fire everyone in turkey and close the offices. I know the government really wants that.

 

Google needs to buy a private military and just threaten to invade....

 

lol try paying taxes sometime.. some tax laws have you thinking it was thought up by a facking lunatic

 

Fine, then they aren't allowed to do business in Turkey.

All I'm suggesting is: if you do business in a place, you pay tax in that place.

 

lol

 

I understand that there is some office in Turkey. However if that office is not making any money, it shouldn't be taxed. If the office makes no money, it's the same as the office not really being there and what turkey is really saying is the Google owes taxes because google.com is available to the country. Imagine if every country tried to tax every site that is "available" for its citizens to view. Do you expect Google and every other site to pay tax to every single country with internet? Google would be paying 4000% taxes on it's revenue when all said and done, paying more in taxes than they make.

It's different when you produce a physical product, you can tax the product at the border, and at most any product is only going to be taxed at one or two borders. In my opinion the internet is untaxable. It's too non-central.

Google is apparently providing Turkey with a couple jobs (plus the income those employees spend within the country). They should take that and be happy.

 

No they most certainly shouldn't, because what you're saying is that no intangibles should be taxed. With developed countries (which Turkey is only debatably) making more on their information economies than on goods, you're setting yourself up for a situation where most of the economy goes untaxed, which is crazy.

It is not the same as the office not being there. Presumably Google run this office for a reason, and the only reason they have is that it makes them money. But really, the fact of local employees and buildings makes no difference. Google is making money out of putting ads out in Turkey, and in doing so it is using Turkish infrastructure. It should pay its way.

P

 

It is not wrong, it is simply
good business sense. Why pay 20% tax (say) on your profits in the UK when you can pay 15% by having the transaction take place in Ireland? If the UK government lowered the tax rate to 15% as well Google would probably happily pay taxes in the UK. Unless you want global regulation of a single global economy this way of working for multinational companies isn't going to change. Besides, we forget the money is still being taxed at various stages before and after it reaches Google. UK Google employees will all be paying income tax, for example.

 

So the UK government can have some tax revenue to spend on things, is why.

 

I hope that was supposed to be ironic. There is no reason for Google to want to support the UK government when it isn't a reciprocal arrangement. The Irish government is kind to tech companies (Dell and Apple certainly seem to agree with Google, for example) and the tech companies reciprocate by paying their taxes in Ireland.