
Google to pay $1B in France to settle fiscal fraud probe - etchezaldun
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-tech-google-tax/google-agrees-to-550-million-fine-in-france-to-settle-fiscal-fraud-probe-idUSKCN1VX1SM
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breadandcrumbel
Maybe I don't know much But every time I see that Google gets fined (even if
$1B) it feels to me like a a Ferrari got parking ticket

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mehrdadn
A Ferrari parking ticket probably wouldn't get anywhere near 1% of its owner's
annual income though?

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decebalus1
But it can get towed. Like a person would if caught with fiscal fraud.

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mehrdadn
So then it's not similar to a Ferrari getting a parking ticket, right?

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thewhitetulip
I watched a TV show called Billions and it is illuminating as to how these big
companies and people easily avoid touched by the law. They pay pennies on the
dollar aka fine and move along with 0 actual damage.

Look at what happened to Panama papers or Bermuda Papers or even what Snowden
had said.

"Little people pay taxes" was a line I read in Panama Papers book, one which
I'll never forget

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rayiner
You know that’s not a documentary right.

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harperlee
You know fiction can be illuminating toward several realities, and be the most
effective idea-communication tool, plus gets around legal issues quite easily,
right? The parent didn’t say more than that, that it was illuminating, on a
personal level.

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m-p-3
I wish fiscal fraud was more hardhly punished. In a democratic nation, it's
basically stealing money from all of us, and not putting a share of resources
that supports programs that benefit citizens of all income levels.

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lanevorockz
It's also anti-competitive behaviour which in the end makes the fine an
acceptable cost for the virtual monopoly.

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tantalor
How is it anti-competitive?

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hjerjin
Two companies(nvidea, AMT) make similar products and hold a roughly 50:50
market share. both are doing well, both are selling units.

nvidea grows greedy and hires shady accountants to commit tax fraud, enabling
nvidea to keep more after-tax money.

next year, nvidea has more money to dump into R&D -- they build a better
product, and charge more for it. market responds, nvidea grows richer, ATM
suffers losses.

nvidea keeps stealing money. has more for R&D, and more for marketing. nvidea
buying sponsored reviews. keep building reliable products. more money for
support staff.

ATM operating with a smaller budget every year. still improving, but not
growing.

nvidea has even more money for R&D. more money for aggressive marketing. more
money for sponsoring studios. "our art was built with nvidea products, and is
best enjoyed using nvidea products".

the practice of stealing money to further growth to eclipse the competition by
any means is hella old.

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Reventlov
To me, it's a good deal for Google. I'd prefer to see them sued and condemned
in a court rather than seeing this kind of "pay to settle" agreement. It feels
so American.

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SolaceQuantum
So forgive me, because I'm a very ignorant person:

 _Why don 't we just jail executives responsible if they consistently fail to
abide by the law?_

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rayiner
To nitpick: jail is where you hold people pending trial. Prison is where you
send people as punishment.

That aside:

(1) We do jail executives, all the time.

(2) The reason maybe you think we don’t jail _enough_ executives is because
it’s hard to prove they did anything wrong. The criminal standard for proof is
very high: beyond a reasonable doubt. When it comes to “blue collar” crimes,
that’s pretty easy to meet. You wouldn’t believe the amount of evidence that
exists in a typical drug crime! The defendant tried to sell drugs to an
undercover cop; they found more drugs and an illegal firearm in the car; they
searched his phones and got extensive evidence of drug transactions. (That is
also why so many such crimes result in guilty pleas.)

But here the government didn’t win a case. It settled. You settle because
there is risk you won’t win at trial. If you have to get accounting experts on
the stand to argue about whether the thing that happened is illegal or not,
good luck proving that beyond a reasonable doubt. (I don’t know what the
standard is in France I don’t expect it’s much different.) Additionally, this
is a tax case. It’s a “you put this number under section 3.3(b) instead of
3.3(c).” To secure a criminal conviction in a tax case, you need to prove
beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant’s interpretation of the law was
not different from the government’s but that no reasonable person would have
interpreted it the way the defendant did. Tax positions are carefully vetted
and at a large organization like Google you’ll never take a tax position that
isn’t at least plausible.

Stepping back, the problem is that you’re taking the government’s position at
face value. At least in the US, the government prosecutes many cases that are,
at best, based on aggressive or creative interpretations of the law. Of course
the government says “Google defrauded the tax office.” Of course they have to
say that. But dig into some high-profile white collar prosecutions. In the US
they’re generally a matter of public record. They often are far from clear
cut.

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namdnay
To nitpick your nitpick: that's only the case in America - everywhere else,
Jail and Prison are synonyms

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Jedd
To go one level deeper, elsewhere it's gaol.

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mkl
I don't think that's true. Even for .uk, Google returns 55.5 million hits for
"jail" and only 600 thousand for "gaol". For .au it's similar, and .nz is a
little more even, but still "jail" wins by a lot.

From [https://www.spectator.co.uk/2014/04/why-did-we-ever-spell-
ja...](https://www.spectator.co.uk/2014/04/why-did-we-ever-spell-jail-gaol/),
"The Guardian long persisted with gaol too but changed to jail in the 1980s,
like the other English papers."

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Jedd
Undoubtedly common usage, especially in the pop media, has regrettably shifted
towards the North American trends, as with so many words.

In Australia there's a move away from prison/jail/gaol and towards
'corrective/correctional/detention facility / centre' presumably to make the
places sound more aligned with their political or social intent.

However each of the Australian state's active legislation still refers to them
as gaols.

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danans
Good. But governments need to move on to addressing the far greater billions
in potential taxes that big corporations _legally_ avoid through complicated
tax loopholes.

Granted, this is going to require significant changes politically in many
countries, but among the general public across the spectrum, the hope that the
wealth held by large corporations will trickle down to them through market
mechanisms has long since worn quite thin.

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jpkeisala
"The combined tax payment is less than the 1.6 billion euros the finance
ministry had been seeking from Google"

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globuous
Does any one know why the url says 550 million ?

[https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-tech-google-
tax/go...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-tech-google-tax/google-
agrees-to-550-million-fine-in-france-to-settle-fiscal-fraud-probe-
idUSKCN1VX1SM)

~~~
uwemaurer
"The settlement comprises a fine of 500 million euros and additional taxes of
465 million euros". Probably it referred to the fine in USD

~~~
globuous
Ahh, thanks ! ;)

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gpm
That's about 15 euros per person in France.

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rbrtdrmpc-
and the 0.0003960339% of the GDP

so what :)

~~~
areyousure
You're off by two orders of magnitude.

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jquery
Is this a shadow trade war in response to America’s dominance in tech? I keep
seeing absolutely massive fines of American tech companies in Europe, fines
marked up to account for Google’s global revenues. Do they make their
homegrown companies pay such outrageous fines? $1B is a staggering amount of
money, probably all of Google’s profits from France for years to come.

To be clear I think France has every right to do this and Google can decide to
close up shop there if they want, nobody is forcing Google to operate in an
unfriendly environment.

~~~
anacoluthe
Maybe it is a response to a more global situation. Please look into corruption
charges and fines of US Justice on European companies such as Alcatel, Société
Générale, Alstom and you'll that these fines are quite a good instrument to
weaken strategic European competitors (and the opposite is true as well) and
even take them over. Example:
[https://www.economist.com/business/2019/01/17/how-the-
americ...](https://www.economist.com/business/2019/01/17/how-the-american-
takeover-of-a-french-national-champion-became-intertwined-in-a-corruption-
investigation)

~~~
jquery
Very interesting, looks the fines are tit for tat from a game theoretic
perspective. It seems the headlines are dominated by fines of American
enterprises but that doesn’t paint a full picture.

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decebalus1
It seems the Chickenshit club[0] has expanded to Europe.

[0] [https://www.amazon.com/Chickenshit-Club-Department-
Prosecute...](https://www.amazon.com/Chickenshit-Club-Department-Prosecute-
Executives/dp/1501121367)

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thecleaner
Well this is good news that the probe finished rather early and the fine
amount will go into the state coffers. It also sets a very good precedent so
this seems to me lile an absolute win.

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onetimemanytime
I know Google makes a lot of money but a billion here and 5 there--and the
forced behavior change--might make a dent in their pocketbook.

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thefounder
Business as usual

