
‘Operation Tulip’ Takes Prosecutors Offline for Google Tax Raid - Jerry2
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-05-30/-operation-tulip-takes-prosecutors-offline-for-google-tax-raid
======
clamprecht
> "It's pretty much a fight between David and Goliath", [the prosecutor] said.

Really? France, a sovereign G8 nation, calling Google Goliath? How are they
measuring size? Google's market capitalization is $500 billion, is this more
valuable than the country of France?

~~~
ljf
Do you think the French Tax office has 500 billion in resources? Or 5? Likely
to have a relatively tiny budget and teams compared to even just the legal
teams at Google.

~~~
JohnTHaller
Do you think Google's French office has 500 billion in resources? You can't
compare the worth/resources of the entire company of Google worldwide to a
branch of the French government. You either compare the local Google office to
the French tax office or the country of France to the worldwide company of
Google. Otherwise it's just designed to be deceitful.

Additionally, Google doesn't get to show up with armed men and take things out
of the offices of the French government.

~~~
dogma1138
Google can't fine anyone, they can't deport and they can't put you in jail - a
government can.

------
tener
Additional several years of work are worth less than 200k euro? Either these
tax people are not paid well, or they cannot calculate.

------
c-slice
The last paragraph in the article is a real kicker: they're going to have to
parse millions of documents to build their case. That's going to take an
enormous amount of time and staffing costs. It'll be interesting to see this
play out in the courts or if a settlement is reached before trial.

~~~
toomuchtodo
> That's going to take an enormous amount of time and staffing costs.

Is it? Can't they scan all of those docs in, OCR them (or process the
electronic docs if they're already in that format), and use e-discovery? I
hear so often on HN that legal firms no longer need junior associates or
paralegals for that work, as the software can do the heavy lifting.

~~~
CapitalistCartr
My wife is in law school. The work software can do is still severely limited.
I personally think we are on the cusp of a revolution in this, but we aren't
there yet. Watson could probably do it, if it were as important as doctoring.

Software _has_ made major strides. The old way of sending multiple copies
between sides to be hand redone for each change required stupid amounts of
labor. Now we have Word. But understanding the importance of particular
documents still requires humans. For now.

~~~
HillRat
IBM actually has a system trained on a legal corpus, used for tracking down
potentially-relevant case and statute law. There isn't a huge amount of client
funding in legal AI compared to other applications, and the problems are much
harder than more restricted domains like medicine and pharma, but there's
enough cash to do some interesting work.

------
epoxyhockey
_we worked with computers, but pretty much only with word processing_

The article title sounds like a sensational excuse for an otherwise
technologically unsavvy group of tax agency workers.

~~~
chris_wot
I don't know about that. Do you think they were going to use Google Docs?

~~~
CyberDildonics
Google docs or a physical unconnected legacy word processing machine. Truly
these are the only options.

~~~
sparky_
I'll get my WordPerfect floppies!

------
nickpsecurity
Is France hitting the other big companies with tax shelters or singling out
Google for some reason? I'm not sure.

~~~
greeneggs
It's not just Google. McDonald's, too.

[http://nytimes.com/2016/05/27/business/french-tax-
officials-...](http://nytimes.com/2016/05/27/business/french-tax-officials-
turn-hungry-eye-to-mcdonalds.html)

~~~
plandis
So only American companies?

~~~
tommyman
Do you really think the french tax office just ignores domestic french tax
evasion?

No. The french tax office does not exist solely to go after American
companies. America giving these companies a free pass to pay little to no tax
is ridiculous. They are stealing from your society.

~~~
nickpsecurity
What French or non-American companies are they hitting for over a billion
dollars? So far, we have Google (U.S.) and McDonalds (U.S.). In the past,
Europe pulled same stuff on Microsoft but I don't remember if it was E.U. or
what country.

------
CyberDildonics
Worked offline for over a year?

Did anyone ever think of the crazy solution of having one person properly
configure a firewall?

------
vixen99
If tax evasion is proved then the law will take its course. Not to excuse it
should this happen but I'd be intrigued to know by how much the French economy
has benefited by the increased trade enabled by the Google search engine.
Unanswerable question I guess.

~~~
eru
Not only in terms of Euros, but in terms of utility.

That was a big discussion about eg the impact of Wikipedia. Since users don't
pay for it, but obviously derive lots of utility. The economy would grow in
some real sense because of Wikipedia, but not always measurable in terms of
GDP.

------
kbenson
Not to hijack the conversation, but I find it interesting that bloomberg
_almost_ has a good strategy for popup blocking people.

They present a dialog that says "We noticed that you're using an ad blocker,
which may adversely affect the performance and content on Bloomberg.com. For
the best experience, please whitelist the site." and a few second countdown
before it goes away.

So, since they asked nicely, and it _is_ their content, I turned off ublock
for them, and reloaded. The page loads with the content aligned to the top,
then a second later the content jumps down 200-300 pixels for a second leaving
a white border at the top, then a second after that it jumps up half the size
of the prior white border, because the ad that loaded is too small for the
allotted area.

Congratulations on reinforcing the idea that all site advertising is bad.
ublock has been restored on my end, and you've already exhausted the good will
I was extending towards you with that move.

~~~
waterphone
It is their content, but it's your computer, and you get to choose what code
runs on your computer. And adblockers aren't just blocking ads, they're
blocking tracking scripts and malware and dozens or more performance-reducing
requests per page.

I will never disable adblock for any site. If the site blocks me for blocking
adblock, I will block their adblock blocker, or block the site entirely so I
never mistakenly visit it again.

------
knodi123
"extremely efficient software worth 200,000 euros?"

what could this be referring to?

~~~
password03
An offering from Palantir perhaps?

------
Scoundreller
What plugin should I install on Chrome to block various websites' popups
asking me to turn off my adblocker?

~~~
shitlordism
uBlock Origin

~~~
ironsides
<strike>I'm running uBlock Origin and still getting the notification about
adblocker. They seem to be running some sort of detection mechanism.</strike>

I was running standard uBlock and didn't realize it. Origin seems to bypass
the detection.

~~~
Scoundreller
Hrmmmm, running uBlock Origin 1.7.2, and got hit by it.

~~~
PeCaN
Go to µBlock Origin settings, 3rd-Party Filters, check "Adblock Warning
Removal List" and "Anti-Adblock Killer | Reek‎".

------
chris_wot
The fact that French authorities feel they are weaker than Google, well that's
a deep concern to me.

~~~
icebraining
Of course they would say that when they're looking for a budget increase of
€200k to purchase this new “extremely efficient software”. Whether it's
actually true that they feel weaker than Google can't determined from reading
their PR.

    
    
      - There is to be a departmental reorganisation. A real reshuffle. We may get extra
        responsibilities.
      - Do we want them?
      - We want all responsibilities, Minister, if they mean extra staff and bigger
        budgets. It's the breadth of our responsibilities that makes us important,
        makes YOU important, Minister. When you see vast buildings, huge staff
        and massive budgets, what do you conclude?
      - Bureaucracy?
      - No, Minister, you conclude that at the summit there are men of great stature
        and dignity who hold the world in their hands and tread the earth like princes.
      - Yes, I see.
      - So each new responsibility must be seized eagerly and each old one guarded
        jealously. Entirely in your interests, of course, Minister.

------
transfire
If I ran Google I'd just up and leave France --it's been one thing after
another with them.

------
programLyrique
And Google may have to pay 1.6 billion euros as taxes and fines:
[http://www.reuters.com/article/us-google-france-taxation-
idU...](http://www.reuters.com/article/us-google-france-taxation-
idUSKCN0VX1Z5)

(yes, it was in February, but the investigation now is a follow-up)

