

Google boss: I'm very proud of our tax avoidance scheme - pablisco
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/google-boss-im-very-proud-of-our-tax-avoidance-scheme-8411974.html

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DanBC
Tax evasion is not legal.

Tax planning is legal, and is ordering your financial affairs so that you pay
the minimum tax legal. This is sometimes called tax avoidance.

Because of the behaviour of a number of companies and rich people tax
avoidance has now come to be associated with the grey area around doing
bizarre financial tricks, tricks which will be changed as the law catches up,
to reduce tax obligations beyond a point that most people would call
reasonable.

Very few people are asking for Google to pay full taxes. But if you have staff
here, and you sell services here to people here, then you should probably pay
some tax on those earnings here.

Google might be able to ride out the storm - there's not very many Google
stores for vandals to deface. And they're lucky that they employ all those
smart people. Any laws the UK gov makes will be fairly easy for Google to hop
around.

(I day dream of Google AI / GA programming competitions where the algorithms
battling for survival are those that robustly reduce tax burden to a fraction
of a percent.)

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grantph
So Larry and Sergey don't want Google to be evil, but Eric certainly does and
wants it known that he's an evil overlord. Now I understand their holy
trinity!

I think the UK government will enact some clear laws that hurt Google as a
result.

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roopeshv
funny how the real quote is twisted, "I am very proud of the structure that we
set up. We did it based on the incentives that the governments offered us to
operate."

