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Google Boss: We Follow The Law On Tax
51–60 of 69 posts
Re: Google Boss: We Follow The Law On Tax
#52Without specifics this is just so much hot air. Google's responsibility should not be to find ways to pay more tax. If there are tax loopholes it's the government's job to close them.
I see a disturbing amount of this attitude: it's fine for corporations to be as unethical as they can get away with, and it's up to government to constantly rein them in.
I don't buy it. No, it's not Google's responsibility to find ways to pay tax, but they also shouldn't be constantly finding ways not to pay tax. A company is not a function relentlessly optimising for money, it's made up of real people making decisions. I expect those people to use some sense of what's morally right, not just what the law allows them to do.
The law is a heavy, slow implement, especially when multiple countries are involved. Multinational corporations can rearrange their accounts much faster than we can pass legislation to control them. It's like playing whack-a-mole with a vote before each hammer swing.
If they're dodging taxes within the letter of the law, they can expect judgement in the court of public opinion. Which is how this debate started.
Re: Google Boss: We Follow The Law On Tax
#53Google is clearly in the right here, unless somebody can actually point out a law they're breaking. Simplifying a lot, Google have 2 responsibilities here: Pay at least the amount of tax they owe, maximise stuff shareholders care about. It doesn't take much to work out the optimal solution to them two problems is to pay exactly the minimum amount of tax possible.
Laws are written by politicians, and interpreted by judges.
Tax cases are expensive and complex to investigate. Google probably has more money that the entire UK tax authorities. HMRC has to concentrate their efforts somewhere, and they concentrate on the people who are clearly breaking the law, or where they have whistle-blower evidence that laws are being broken.
That puts companies like Google at an advantage. They can operate at the edge of the law, exploiting loopholes, and then pay more if the laws are changed. And then, if we find out that they are not obeying the law but breaking it they make a deal with HMRC. See the deal Vodafone made where a huge tax bill was waived, if Vodafone paid a small part of the tax they had evaded. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2011/dec/06/hmrc-tax-deal-vo...)
Dodging tax is only beneficial to these companies.
As to why they should pay: Apart from the fact that UK customers of Google buy UK ads for their UK potential customers using UK bank accounts and UK pounds and buy them from UK staff at Google's UK office (with a final 'close the sale' bit of paperwork done in Ireland for the sole purpose of avoiding tax in UK) - apart from that, Google makes use of UK schools and roads and police and fire departments and etc.
No one minds that Google pays less tax than they should. People only mind when Google goes to extraordinary lengths to avoid tax.
Re: Google Boss: We Follow The Law On Tax
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Moving to or setting up a subsidiary in a different jurisdiction: Completely fine. >Doing the same thing for the sole purpose of avoiding taxes: Not fine. And how exactly do you propose to distinguish the two? "Number of employees" is a completely worthless metric. Apple (and/or Foxconn) employs many times more employees in China than in the U.S., does that mean they should be reporting most of their profits in Chin…
I'm pretty sure that Foxconn and Apple are separate corporations, so I have no idea what you're getting at. Apple has 73k employees, 50k of which are in the US. Pretty sure most of them have benefited from US society (education, roads, police stations etc.) or benefit from it now that they have moved to the US.
You're overcomplicating the issue. It's not the accountant's job to make up for lazy lawmaking. It's the lawmakers. Go bug the lawmakers, not the people trying to make money within the law.
Would you seriously have done differently in Google's shoes if it meant the difference between millions of dollars? Billions of dollars? Your answer to that question is probably why you're not making those kinds of decisions.
Re: Google Boss: We Follow The Law On Tax
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm pretty sure that Foxconn and Apple are separate corporations, so I have no idea what you're getting at. Apple has 73k employees, 50k of which are in the US. Pretty sure most of them have benefited from US society (education, roads, police stations etc.) or benefit from it now that they have moved to the US.
You're overcomplicating the issue. It's not the accountant's job to make up for lazy lawmaking. It's the lawmakers. Go bug the lawmakers, not the people trying to make money within the law. Would you seriously have done differently in Google's shoes if it meant the difference between millions of dollars? Billions of dollars? Your answer to that question is probably why you're not making those kinds of decisions.
Well, I suppose I can only quote Larry Page on this:
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He also noted that he has also been sad with how the industry has been unable to advance the Web as quickly as it could have because of a focus on negativity and zero sum gains. He also noted other companies like Oracle and his difficulty in working with them, “Money is more important to them than collaboration.”
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As for your feeble attempt at diverting on the law issue: Look, Apple has more cash reserves than the US government. To act as though all that is needed is lawmakers "finally doing their job right" is ludicrous. The reason why I cannot go bug the lawmakers is because they have dozens of lobbyist per capita throwing money into their faces all day long.
At the end of the day, I believe in human progress. Human progress happens when we are fair and kind to one another. Apple doesn't need all of that money, just as Google doesn't need all of theirs. Asking them to give a tiny bit more back to the society that they are a powerful member of so that everybody is better of is far from being as silly as you try to paint it.
Re: Google Boss: We Follow The Law On Tax
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Government is a parasite on society. Corporations and other private enterprises are what create good societies through mutually advantageous exchanges. In contrast, governments extract wealth by force or the printing of money (fraud) and use it to pay for things that no private person or corporation would pay for (war, prisons, bureaucracy, fat pensions, welfare for people who could work but don't want to, etc.)
nonsense. Consider for a second all of the technology that corporations use in their products that were originally funded by government research projects like the internet(arpanet), world wide web (And others). If government didn't have the scale to take on such projects a lot of these corporations wouldn't exist and a lack of research like those often government funded would just reinforce the status quo.
The assumption you're making is that if government hadn't funded network research, then all of the engineers who worked on the Internet would have been hoeing turnips in the fields. As if only the government can create technology, and that without a government bureaucrat to direct research, we all would still be communicating via smoke signals.
The fact is, that if government hadn't been employing these engineers to create war technologies, our technology would probably be much more advanced and the world would have less war and be a much better place.
Whenever government employs people to do something, it necessarily keeps them from doing something else. This is well explained in chapter 4 of Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson (http://steshaw.org/economics-in-one-lesson/chap04p1.html) in taking the example of government spending for a bridge:
"The bridge exists. It is, let us suppose, a beautiful and not an ugly bridge. It has come into being through the magic of government spending. Where would it have been if the obstructionists and the reactionaries had had their way? There would have been no bridge. The country would have been just that much poorer. Here again the government spenders have the better of the argument with all those who cannot see beyond the immediate range of their physical eyes. They can see the bridge. But if they have taught themselves to look for indirect as well as direct consequences they can once more see in the eye of imagination the possibilities that have never been allowed to come into existence. They can see the unbuilt homes, the unmade cars and washing machines, the unmade dresses and coats, perhaps the ungrown and unsold foodstuffs. To see these uncreated things requires a kind of imagination that not many people have. We can think of these nonexistent objects once, perhaps, but we cannot keep them before our minds as we can the bridge that we pass every working day. What has happened is merely that one thing has been created instead of others.
Re: Google Boss: We Follow The Law On Tax
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
nonsense. Consider for a second all of the technology that corporations use in their products that were originally funded by government research projects like the internet(arpanet), world wide web (And others). If government didn't have the scale to take on such projects a lot of these corporations wouldn't exist and a lack of research like those often government funded would just reinforce the status quo.
The assumption you're making is that if government hadn't funded network research, then all of the engineers who worked on the Internet would have been hoeing turnips in the fields. As if only the government can create technology, and that without a government bureaucrat to direct research, we all would still be communicating via smoke signals. The fact is, that if government hadn't been employing these engineers to…
I'm not making any assumptions and certainly not assuming they'd be farm hands or that only government can create techology. It's all around us in the details.
The fact is that a businesses number one aim is to make a profit and that restricts most businesses to seeing no further than the end of their nose and limits their capacity for risky investments. When it comes to research, corporations should be looking for profitable applications of research before anything else because it's their number one aim. This means that a lot of research that doesn't have any clear practical application to a profitable model or doesn't meet a percieved profitable timescale is unlikely to be pursued.
I'm not denying that some companies do some groundbreaking research just that the inherint nature of corporations prevents them from taking risks that governments can take and which a lot of corporations capitalise on. Corporation and government funded research are two sides of the same coin. They both bring their respective benefits to society but one won't work without the other.
Most corporations would never have taken the big initial risks and government would likely never have practically applied the findings to a valuable product.
Re: Google Boss: We Follow The Law On Tax
#58Google is clearly in the right here, unless somebody can actually point out a law they're breaking. Simplifying a lot, Google have 2 responsibilities here: Pay at least the amount of tax they owe, maximise stuff shareholders care about. It doesn't take much to work out the optimal solution to them two problems is to pay exactly the minimum amount of tax possible.
Firstly, if google sees its only responsibilities as "maximize shareholder value" and "obey the letter of the law" then perhaps they should officially give up on the "don't be evil" thing. Secondly, it's disingenuous of them to ask the taxpayer to "just change the rules" if we don't like their avoidance, when they're funding the very regulatory capture which makes it hard for us to do that, via their investment in th…
let me introduce you to: https://plus.google.com/+MattCutts/posts/4U2mpZ6hazU
don't be evil is not the same as do no evil
Re: Google Boss: We Follow The Law On Tax
#59Is "Don't be evil" just a joke or was it actually the motto of Google?
https://plus.google.com/+MattCutts/posts/4U2mpZ6hazU I 'll leave it here again. do no evil is not don't be evil
Re: Google Boss: We Follow The Law On Tax
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So why should the mere existence of servers in the U.K. entitle the country to tax some substantial amount of Google's income? This is wrong. UK customers buy ads to be shown in the UK to UK viewers, from UK staff at Google's UK offices. They pay in UK pound sterling, from UK bank accounts. So far everything is in the UK. It is only at the very end of the process that someone in Google's Ireland office pushes a but…
> K customers buy ads to be shown in the UK to UK viewers, from UK staff at Google's UK offices. They pay in UK pound sterling, from UK bank accounts. So far everything is in the UK. It is only at the very end of the process that someone in Google's Ireland office pushes a button to close the sale, thus taking the sale out of the UK (and our tax system) and into Ireland and their tax system. Except, arguably, the mos…
Well, if you're tying tax to the algorithm then all the money should go back to the mothership. I have no idea what the rates of tax in Ireland vs California are.
It's not that debatable - we'll see unified tax codes across the EU. Some companies (not just Google) pushed things too far and set up weird schemes that exist only to reduce tax to a minimum.
> Google is just taking advantage of that complexity.
"Taking advantage of" also has negative connotations. Exploiting.