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Google's Paris HQ raided in tax probe

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Re: Google's Paris HQ raided in tax probe

#101

Post by Xylakant »

charlesdm wrote: post #31
ciaranm wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people in Europe don't need Lawyers to submit their taxes. In fact, until I started my own company (UK) - I didn't 'submit' taxes. It was calculated (and taken) automatically based on my salary and otherwise declared income.

This depends a lot on the country. For example: I'd say most self employed people in Belgium use an accountant to file their taxes. Some (a subset) of those also have a tax lawyer who helps them optimise certain things. Self employed people (i.e. entrepreneurs) who make decent money will have a tax lawyer, because inevitably, you'll bump into an unfriendly tax collector somewhere down the road.

Taxes for self employed people are much more complicated than taxes for salaried employees. Everywhere that I know, taxes from salaries are automatically withheld by the employer - those taxes have probably been calculated by a tax accountant in the first place. There's practically no way you'd need to pay extra taxes if your only income is your salary, so you can opt out of filing taxes.

For self-employed people there are many more rules and regulations: How to write off which kind of cost and purchase, filing VAT if required, etc. so that's already cost efficient if you hire someone qualified.

Re: Google's Paris HQ raided in tax probe

#102

Post by BinaryIdiot »

0xFFC wrote: post #26

Idk, but I feel Google is under tremendous pressure right now.Oracle likely going to win (they have best legal team in whole industry). Europe will hit Google with antitrust and now this.Microsot is coming for them, and they(Microsoft) positioned themselves very well. Maybe I don't realize correctly, but it seems Google is going to have hard time with all of this.

> Oracle likely going to win (they have best legal team in whole industry)

You may be right but I really hope you're not. Such a dangerous precedent.

Re: Google's Paris HQ raided in tax probe

#103

Post by evgen »

_wmd wrote: post #53
criddell wrote: post #36

What's the purpose of the raid? To seize file cabinets filled with documents? Wouldn't a company like Google have most of their documents in the cloud?

In many locales by law businesses are required to maintain certain sets of documents at their registered address. For example in the UK this includes at least the company articles of incorporation, although the list is more extensive than that. It's one reason many small businesses have their accountant as their registered address. Private limited companies must keep some or all of their statutory records at their re…

There is really not much to sieze from an office like this, but I can assure you that the infosec and physical security teams test people on raid process and probably do such drills on at least a yearly basis. Basically how to hand over exactly as much as you are required to provide, shield the rest, and notify people upstream to start the internal side of the response process.

If this was an engineering office then there would be a lot more involved (making sure such a raid did not expose code or allow on-premise agents to access raw data that an engineer at that facility might otherwise be able to access for dev and debugging purposes, etc.) I think this is just a sales office really, so it is more symbolic than anything else...

Re: Google's Paris HQ raided in tax probe

#104

Post by rpgmaker »

6stringmerc wrote: post #81
Bartweiss wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In America, there's at least one clear example of this - laws against "structuring". Basically, they say that it's criminal to arrange financial transactions with the purpose of avoiding laws about financial transactions. As an example, banks are required to report all deposits of $20,000. It's a right to deposit $19,999 into a bank account, nothing wrong there. But to deposit $19,999 five times in a row, rather than…

It's $10,000 and that's what led to former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert being investigated regarding his payments of hush money. He was actively trying to circumvent the controls. That's against the law. Just a clarification, having taken anti-money laundering compliance courses on occasion.

That's because of the Patriot ACT, a law he helped to pass btw: https://twitter.com/mtracey/status/718656246400880641

Re: Google's Paris HQ raided in tax probe

#105

Post by eloisant »

DannyBee wrote: post #87
eloisant wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've had an office in Paris since 2002, for business. Maybe you're talking about their engineering office. You might think they made it to please politicians, but I think the real reasons is for recruitment. There are many talented engineers in France, some of them not willing to move to Zurich, London or Silicon Valley. If they want a chance to hire them they need an office in France. Anyway, supposing they get r…

Yes, they've had a business office, that precisely noone cares about :) "You might think they made it to please politicians" This is not even a secret. The original office existed because of certain folks not wanting to relocate, but it was only ever grown to please politicians. It was even made into a media event with eric schmidt and the president of france. "but I think the real reasons is for recruitment" This is…

1. The French engineers cost less than SV or Zurich because the lower salaries make up for the higher labour taxes. Google pays well for the market but it's still lower than other locations.

2. They need an office for business reasons, period. Whether they have engineers or not does not change their obligations to the French law and their ability to escape taxes.

3. Google's strategy is not to attract French engineers specifically, but to have offices everywhere to hire talented people where they are.

Re: Google's Paris HQ raided in tax probe

#106

Post by byroot »

logicchains wrote: post #64
cscurmudgeon wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By the same logic Bing, Yahoo and DuckDuckGo (much better for technical searches) could provide Google's services if they disappeared from the face of the earth. The USG was wise enough to fund them when they were extremely risky.

What I meant was Google's founders could still have founded it without government money, it would just have taken them longer to obtain the funding. Money isn't enough to make a search engine; Baidu for instance has the Chinese government behind it but still produces worse results even for Chinese language searches than Google. Bing's had quite a lot of funding from Microsoft put into it.

Even besides that early governmental founding. Companies aren't created nor exist in a vacuum.

Tax payer's money payed for most of the infrastructures, research and education those companies requires to operate.

How can you run a company like Google or any other without educated employees, roads, internet, etc.

Entrepreneurs love to think they built themselves alone, but they are just a product of the society they lives in.

Now as a society you can choose to either socialize or privatise your infrastructures, but you'll have to pay for them either way.

Re: Google's Paris HQ raided in tax probe

#107

Post by jdmichal »

tomp wrote: post #90
rayiner wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But "unreasonable" means something closer to its literal meaning in U.S. law. It means a conclusion that a rational person would not reach. So "unreasonable" is a pretty strong safeguard. It's hard to reach an "unreasonable" conclusion about your legal obligations by accident. In the criminal context, we also have the rule of leniety, which holds that ambiguities in criminal laws are resolved in favor of the defendan…

> It means a conclusion that a rational person would not reach. So "unreasonable" is a pretty strong safeguard. This is all nice in theory, but in practice, it's happened multiple times that the (Supreme Court's) interpretation of the same law has changed. Granted, this has happened over decades (or even generations), but this implies that (1) either the definition of what is "reasonable" has changed (I find this unl…

Judges are not infallible, and they are not isolated from the zeitgeist of their time. See Schenck v. United States, where the original ruling was overly broad and later refined.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States#Subse...

Re: Google's Paris HQ raided in tax probe

#108

Post by ihsw »

mike_hearn wrote: post #25
bambax wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't know about American law, but in French the notion exists and is called "abus de droit"; just because you can do something "in general", you can't do it with the specific purpose of circumventing another legal obligation. For example, as an Irish company, you can open a subsidiary in France to do business in France. That's a right. But if you're doing business in France essentially, you can't make the French com…

For example, as an Irish company, you can open a subsidiary in France to do business in France. The whole point of the EU single market is that you do not have to do that. You can set up shop in Ireland and sell to the French market until the cows come home. You only owe Irish taxes (modulo the recent completely crazy VAT changes). Laws that say "forget the law, anything we think is unreasonable is illegal" are a gro…

> Laws that say "forget the law, anything we think is unreasonable is illegal" are a growing problem in Europe.

This has been occurring in European law since time immemorial -- giving the judicial branch maximum discretion is viewed as democratizing.

It is hardly growing rather than being slowly exposed.

Re: Google's Paris HQ raided in tax probe

#109

Post by ptaipale »

stuaxo wrote: post #79
tomp wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's completely within the right of Ireland and Irish citizens to promote investment by lowering the tax rates, as it is within the right of France and French citizens to tax companies that earn profits in France according to French tax law. I really don't see a problem.

And yet Ireland has harsh austerity that has pushed many into poverty, so it wouldn't seem to be making much difference to citizens. http://www.irishexaminer.com/viewpoints/analysis/irelands-au...

France doesn't have austerity... yet. But Ireland is already getting over it.

Re: Google's Paris HQ raided in tax probe

#110

Post by DannyBee »

eloisant wrote: post #105
DannyBee wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, they've had a business office, that precisely noone cares about :) "You might think they made it to please politicians" This is not even a secret. The original office existed because of certain folks not wanting to relocate, but it was only ever grown to please politicians. It was even made into a media event with eric schmidt and the president of france. "but I think the real reasons is for recruitment" This is…

1. The French engineers cost less than SV or Zurich because the lower salaries make up for the higher labour taxes. Google pays well for the market but it's still lower than other locations. 2. They need an office for business reasons, period. Whether they have engineers or not does not change their obligations to the French law and their ability to escape taxes. 3. Google's strategy is not to attract French engineer…

You keep changing your comment, so it's hard to respond :)

1. This is, AFAIK, not accurate for Google.

2. This was not the question. The claim was "surely they need some great presence in the 6th greatest economy", and the answer is "no, they don't". Unless you mean "an office with 2 people in it", which is kind of irrelevant to the broader point of whether google would pull out of france. Most people would see closing the engineering office as pulling out of france, the same way closing the russia engineering office was seen as pulling out of russia, etc.

I'll simply avoid engaging about what their obligations are, because it's not my area of expertise. I also don't care much, because i know that if every country tries to extract billions from google and others, like they are trying to now, there aren't enough billions to go around. So it won't end well for someone.

3. Errr, no. This is not Google's strategy, it's actually quite the opposite. Google asks people to relocate to one of the existing eng centers, and if they are unwilling, passes on them.

Google very much does not want hundreds of engineering offices, much to the disdain of a good number of people.

Google's distributed office strategy is a point of contention even within Google :)

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