Google set to pay £380m in France despite UK being its largest base

[meridian]

Google set to pay £380m in France despite UK being its largest base

The point on VAT was that Google put all sales via Ireland, so VAT (for businesses that were not VAT registered) was sent to Ireland and UK did not collect it - I don't know how much, but it would be substantial amount given massive sales: £1 bln sales, 20% VAT, if 10% of customers by value don't have VAT registration then £20 mln per year lost.

This is an odd one though. The U.K. VAT rate is 20%, in Ireland it's 23%. So are UK customers paying 23% VAT? Or are Google only returning 20% to the Irish Revenue?

Edit: found it http://www.nortonaccountancy.co.uk/g...oogle-adwords/

[Waldorf]

This is an odd one though. The U.K. VAT rate is 20%, in Ireland it's 23%. So are UK customers paying 23% VAT? Or are Google only returning 20% to the Irish Revenue?

Edit: found it http://www.nortonaccountancy.co.uk/g...oogle-adwords/

It would appear from your link that NO VAT is paid (provided the client is VAT registered). I suppose that is the same for most transactions anyway, it's just a long way to achieve the same thing. Hopefully we can change this if we Vote Leave !

[AtW]

This is an odd one though. The U.K. VAT rate is 20%, in Ireland it's 23%. So are UK customers paying 23% VAT? Or are Google only returning 20% to the Irish Revenue?

They were paying whatever Ireland's VAT rate was, UK was totally missing out. UK VAT registered companies could avoid (legally) paying VAT by giving their VAT number.

However from 1 Jan 2015 VAT regs changed big time for electronic services - place of supply is now where the customer is, so EU companies have to charge VAT rate of the country where customer is (within EU), keep track of changes in VAT rates and also repayment of such VAT will go to respective countries, so VAT dodge would no longer work, but the main reason Google (and many others) used Ireland was not for VAT purposes but to gain corp tax advantage, ironically they did not even pay Ireland's 12.5% corp tax - using another trick to take money out, so even Ireland was fooked over!

[AtW]

If you look up the accounts for Google UK, the employment costs were £289m for 1835 employees, this included share bonuses of £67m - but the average comes to £157K each. The accounts are quite old, December 2013 so things will have moved on since then.

It's reasonably to assume they pay full PAYE in those cases, so that's good, that was never an issue - the issue was corp tax which they paid pityful amounts by shifting sales to Ireland.

[SlipTheJab]

It's reasonably to assume they pay full PAYE in those cases, so that's good, that was never an issue - the issue was corp tax which they paid pityful amounts by shifting sales to Ireland.

PAYE is not a tax paid by a company but levied on an individual, its merely the companies role to pass it on (or not as the case may be with several notables companies, mainly football related!)

[greenlake]

French investigators avoided the Internet, stuck to word processors and renamed Google ‘Tulip’ to prevent leaks as they prepared a secret tax raid at the company’s Paris offices last week.

'Operation Tulip' Takes Prosecutors Offline for Google Tax Raid - Bloomberg

[AtW]