Google’s Shady Tax Evasion Practices Screw the govt (And You) Out of $60 Billion Each year [Google]

America corporate tax rate is 35%. Google, partially founded with taxpayer money and trading at $607 a share, pays 2.4%. How is this possible? Through an arsenal of offshore tax tricks with names like the ” Dutch Sandwich .”

Google’s startlingly low rate-how much do you pay per annum?-goes back to a deal brokered with the IRS itself. The feds let Google license its search and ad tech to a subsidiary in Ireland-Google Ireland Holdings-which begins an extended, international cash siphon that leads to Bermuda. Licensing tech from Google racks up expenses, which enable Google’s dummy company to duck Irish tax law. The cash generated in Ireland is shuttled to the Netherlands, which, as a result of EU law, further keeps government hands out of Google’s earnings. From here, revenue is paid to another subsidiary in Bermuda, where it becomes virtually invisible-under Irish law, this tropical tail end of this money snake isn’t required to disclose any financial documents.

Using Ireland as go-between is a standard practice-Microsoft does it, and Facebook is calling to do it. So why does it matter? Should we just applaud them for being as smart as we’d expect them to be, and saving a bundle of cash?

No.

Speaking to Bloomberg news, Abraham J. Briloff, a professor emeritus of accounting at Baruch College, sums it up: Google is ” flying a banner of doing no evil, and then they’re perpetrating evil under our noses. Who is it that paid for the underlying concept on which they built these billions of greenbacks of revenues? It was paid for by the us citizenry.”

And he’s right.

The National Science Foundation-run along with your tax money-funded the Stanford University research that turned Google into what it really is. Google cheating on its taxes, even supposing technically legal, is a gross hypocrisy. Besides presenting an enormous middle finger to its tax paying users, who don’t make over $2 billion a quarter, it presents a second, larger middle finger to the very organization that put it on its feet. Nobody likes paying taxes-and yes, you have got some legitimate beef with the way in which your tax money is spent. But the reality remains that some of it goes to things like, well, indirectly creating Google, and who knows what else ? We’d not evrer know, if mega tech firms keep eating Dutch Sandwiches. [ Bloomberg ]

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This post is tagged: financial documents, government hands, national science foundation, professor emeritus, Stanford university, taxpayer money