Its tax structure led Margaret Hodge, former chairwoman of the United Kingdom parliamentary public accounts committee, to accuse Google of being “immoral”, wrote the FT.
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Google is paying £46.2m in taxes on United Kingdom profits of £106m for the 18 months to June 2015, together with back taxes and interest going back to 2005. Moving forward, more sales activity will be registered in Britain rather than Ireland, but the company denies that the back tax payment is an admission of having avoided tax in the past.
Between 2005 and 2013, Google had United Kingdom turnover of 17 billion pounds and its main United Kingdom unit reported a tax charge of 52 million pounds, filings showed. “We have two big concerns: Brexit, and whether there is a deal between the United Kingdom and other members, which we very much hope there is because it would be very much conducive to stability, … and the other is the refugee crisis which is a bit of a make or break from my personal perspective, she said”.
Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell dismissed the sum as trivial and said Google should be paying ten times that amount.
However, critics said the deal is “derisory”, a “sweetheart deal” and a ” cosy deal”.
Meg Hillier, who chairs parliament’s public accounts scrutiny committee, said global companies had been “running rings around tax officials”.
Mr Osborne described the agreement as a “victory” for action on tax avoidance, saying: “We now expect to see other firms pay their share”.
Google has been minimizing its tax bill for years in the United Kingdom by keeping its headquarters in Ireland, where rates are lower.
“I just hope the Australian Tax Office search for any missing Google tax millions is as powerful as the Google search engine”, he said.
Apple Inc., which is also under European Union investigation, late past year reached an agreement with Italy’s tax agency to settle a dispute stretching from 2008-13, agreeing to pay about EUR318 million ($343 million).
“I want the message to go out that in Britain taxes are low, but they have to be paid”, U.K. Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne told The Guardian.
In an interview with the BBC, Matt Brittin, head of Google’s European operations, firmly denies that Google has been avoiding paying taxes.
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A Google spokesperson said in a statement: “The way multinational companies are taxed has been debated for many years and the worldwide tax system is changing as a result. It could be in the hundreds of millions – we need to know”, he said.
