Google's Tax Scheme Saved it $3.1B

H

HardOCP News

[H] News
Joined
Dec 31, 1969
Messages
0
A tax scheme that saved Google $3.1 billion? Damn, I'd just be happy if I had a plan that saved me three dollars or enough for that “Dutch sandwich” they were talking about. :eek:

Google Inc. cut its taxes by $3.1 billion in the last three years using a technique that moves most of its foreign profits through Ireland and the Netherlands to Bermuda. Google’s income shifting involving strategies known to lawyers as the “Double Irish” and the “Dutch Sandwich” helped reduce its overseas tax rate to 2.4 percent.
Click to expand...
 
Funny because the owners are pretty big libs that want to tax the hell out of us yet skirt them for their own company. Typical liberal...."What I say is good for you doesn't apply to me!"
 
bpmurrGT said:
Funny because the owners are pretty big libs that want to tax the hell out of us yet skirt them for their own company. Typical liberal...."What I say is good for you doesn't apply to me!"
Click to expand...

Typical politician...."What I say is good for you doesn't apply to me!"

FTFY :D
 
jiminator said:
as many as possibly can. and remember, if the money is brought back to the US it gets taxed again
Click to expand...

And that's why the circle of life continues , as log as we have a corporate tax rate of 35% it aint gonna change anytime soon.
 
jiminator said:
as many as possibly can. and remember, if the money is brought back to the US it gets taxed again
Click to expand...

And that's why the circle of life continues , as long as we have a corporate tax rate of 35% it aint gonna change anytime soon.
 
Meh, they probably did more public good with the money than the government would have.

Uncle Sam spends money on bombs and bailouts. Google gave us self-driving cars and a better internet. :)
 
bpmurrGT said:
Funny because the owners are pretty big libs that want to tax the hell out of us yet skirt them for their own company. Typical liberal...."What I say is good for you doesn't apply to me!"
Click to expand...

I think the saying goes, "Good for me, not for thee.."
 
Whats really sad is that is only one company, think of all the others, and that means 3.1 billion that individual taxpayers have to make up for lost government revenue.
 
pankkake said:
They are? It's pretty clear for Bill Gates, but for them I'm not that sure. Anyway, yeah it's not surprising, it's always "tax everyone but me!!".
Click to expand...

They're ok about getting taxed... its just the company that they're not taxing.

Gotta love it that the SCOTUS says corporations are individuals ... yet I'd like to see an individual try to do some tax turbo flip like this... or hell have any particular state give tax breaks to an individual.

That said, they're in California which typically is not known as a business friendly state when it comes to taxes.
 
High taxes doesn't always mean bad business environments, case being the east and west coast feature higher taxes and also better services, especially education services, that generate the brain power needed by big companies for R&D in science fields.

International profits should get taxed less. Write this into the tax code and there will be no need to go around it. Imagine an international company with a branch in the US, Canada, and Europe, and every country taxed 30% of the full international profit amount... the company would get 10% left lol...
 
If any of us made enough money to make this a viable option.. we'd be doing it as well...

If you actually have morales... you wont make that kind of money anyway...lol
 
Wow thanks for fucking the Fed out of 3billion dollars Google. Meanwhile, I pay my taxes, as I must, or the IRS will illegally confiscate my things.:mad:

I would try to say something to the effect of: How many sets of advanced body armor could we have fielded for our soldiers with 3billion dollars? We all know the truth, even if they payed it, our Government would do nothing like that with it.

This kind of shit should be illegal. You better believe that Google isn't the only one who does it either.

This reminds me of the time the Attorney General had to ask several large corporations to stop laundering money for drug cartels. Laissez-faire capitalism at its finest.
 
Has nothing to do with "liberals". This is another example that Google is quickly changing from the "Do No Evil (tm)" heroes they've been in years past to a typical privacy-hating corporate enterprise. Moves like this and their slimebag CEO's views on privacy are eroding the traditional corporate climate that set Google apart from competitors.

A further examples as to why corporations and capitalist endeavors as a whole need to be regulated and saddled with a proverbial choke chain to ensure they are controlled and made to bow to what is good for society whenever greed causes them to step out of line. The merchant class is WAY out of control in the world today and needs to be hobbled .
 
I like Google and their practices but that's ugly though correct to show what's wrong with international taxing.
 
the money was earned completely overseas. most countries charge taxes for taking it out of their country. then they get taxed by the country it goes to. and if it comes here they get taxed again. How do you guys figure the american government deserves a 40% slice of that pie?

somehow people have gotten some sort of convoluted thinking as regards taxes and government. Businesses are not receiving entitlements. It is the government that is the big welfare state, sucking entitlements out of the population wherever it can. That is what needs to change.
 
This article is rather absurd, and frankly preys on people's (understandable) ignorance of international corporate tax.

The 3.1B number is rather farcical because it assumes an absurd baseline- that absent the current strategies, Google would have intentionally sought out the worst possible tax strategy.

People also fail to understand that tax planning devices used by Google do not get Google out of paying taxes owed. Rather, the strategies can generally only defer paying taxes. The US is one of the few countries that taxes persons and corporations on their worldwide income, but a foreign subsidiary of a US corporation is not directly taxed on US income. However, when income earned abroad is returned to the US it is taxed.

Most people also don't realize that the corporate income tax is actually regressive. In the end, a corporation does not pay taxes- the money has to come from actual people. The question is how they pay. In practice, corporate income taxes are mostly paid for by rank and file workers in the form of lower salaries.

And RE: loopholes .I don't think most people understand what tax loopholes are. They are not intentional give-aways. Certain tax credits are- "loopholes' are not. What most people think of as "loopholes" are actually logical flaws in the tax code. For example, a common tax shelter in the 1990s was the son of BOSS, which only worked because the tax code forgot to take into account certain contingent liabilities (such as outstanding tort claims) when calculating the tax basis of certain partnerships. Eventually, new treasury regulations were passed and the problem was fixed. The "Dutch Sandwich" is similar. Many "Dutch Sandwich" type transactions are no longer viable because the problems have been fixed. Think of the tax code as a computer program in progress where each debugging command takes years of debate to implement.
 
Wow.. it's nice that crazy conservative rhetoric made it's way here on a post about Google. Quick few facts:

1. Everyone on this board is benefiting from an Obama tax CUT.
2. If wealthy people do better things than the government with their money, why is it that wealthy people tend to just stay wealthy? If trickle down economics worked so well, why are the Walton family still worth a collective 60 billion dollars when they've had that money for half a century?

I'm all for people amassing wealth. I'm not for amassing wealth to basically treat it like Scrooge McDuck and just stare at it. The larger reason many people don't have jobs is that the upper 1% is hoarding cash more and more, the Google guys aren't the exception, they're the rule. For all the complaining done about the government spending, no one cares that we're in the deepest tax cuts in years while supporting 2 wars and the vast increase in government responsibility and manpower that the Patriot Act instilled. We were broke the second the first private contractor set foot in Iraq.

Do corporations donate and see fit to spread wealth around? Sure. Do they do it for your benefit? Probably not. Bill Gates went to Memphis and bribed them with millions of dollars into not failing any children under grade 4. Apparently not being able to read or not bring a gun to school aren't important enough to hold a child back. What would have been better than some god forsaken social experiment? How about bribing the city into restructuring a school system that has consistently lagged behind for the better half of 4 decades.

Liberal or Conservative, we both know the economy is crap because the banks are still doing the same crap and that the government is spending FAR too much money. The key difference is, unlike conservatives, liberals have seen this for YEARS. Just because Bush borrowed from Social Security and bankrupted it's coffers to make the deficit look better than it was, people ignored it. They didn't care when the taxes were cut during wartime for the first time ever. Nor did they care when vast new offices called Homeland Security and a HUGE restructuring occurred in the entire executive branch, all costing hundreds of billions of dollars. It's cute that people care now. You were ok when Bush pushed us from 4 to 11 trillion dollars but 12 trillion was just too much. Obama inherits the largest government ever, huge tax cuts that are popular, the worst economy in 80 years, 2 wars and a banking crisis that happened right before he was swore in that murdered wall street and housing prices and people complain that it's his fault that he could fix all that in 2 years. So pathetic.
 
So Obama tried to fix any of this stuff? No, it was free government health care for everyone. That's the promise anyway. People have come to realize the health care will not be free, and government borrowing money is also not free. Every person in this country needs to balance their budget or they go broke. The government needs to abide by the same rules. If it is financing 30% of the national budge via debt then the obvious answer is that the government needs to be cut by a minimum of 30%. This happens all the time in "evil" corporations.

The way the government is being run today is extremely shortsighted. Think of the chaos and probably millions of deaths that would result if our government collapses. It cannot happen? Happens all the time in other countries. But then I guess housing values always go up also, right?

You can't tax to fix this mess. Taxes make everything worse. Governement needs to be reduced to live within its means. All the blanket guarantees need to go. Government has no mandate to be daddy for everyone from conception to the grave. That is personal responsibility.
 
WHO THE FUCK CARES?

Sorry but you guys got to be kidding me. Who gives even gives a fuck? Google is a corporation and corporations exist to profit.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top