Saturday 23 January 2016

Google Tax

A smiling Chancellor announced today that the Government has reached an agreement with Google to pay the British taxman £130m in back taxes.
Mr Osborne told the BBC that the agreement was 'a real vindication of this government's approach to tax avoidance' which is interesting as we may have puffed up the coffers by £130million but the actual amount Google owed in tax was 7 to 10 times more.
Mr Osborne has welcomed the agreement and suggested that it could see other large firms reaching similar deals with the taxman which appears to mean that Google may owe far much more but we will take whatever amount in a 'deal'. 
The tax agreement comes after years of criticism of Google and other multinational firms such as Facebook, Amazon and Starbucks over their tax arrangement in the UK.
In 2010 Vodaphone and HMRC agreed a bill of £1.2 billion when the actual amount the phone operator was due to pay was £8 billion.
As many of us are due to have submitted our Tax Returns by the end of this month i am sure that HMRC will be okay if we agree to only pay a tenth of what we owe in light of this new Government approach to taxation. Won't they?

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