Google is under fire in the UK for its tax practices in the country, and a new key witness (who spoke to The Sunday Times) might put them in deeper hot water when he hands over a reported 100,000 emails and documents to the British Revenue & Customs (HRMC) services. Barney Jones, a former Googler who was at the company between 2004 and 2006, says he has material proof that Google’s London… → Read More
Another big Internet company is the target of Direction générale des finances – France’s equivalent of the IRS – due to tax noncompliance. The agency is asking Amazon to pay $252 million in non-reported tax and penalties. Most of Amazon’s revenue in Europe goes to Luxembourg where the corporate tax is much lower. While it’s legal, there are some subtleties in order to comply with the law. → Read More
Google France could be ordered to pay $1.3 billion to France’s equivalent of the IRS (Direction générale des finances) due to tax noncompliance in 2011. The agency has been investigating Google’s revenue in France for months. With only 138 million euros of revenue in France in 2011, the company has used tax-optimization strategies, but has always stated that they comply with the law. It denies… → Read More
Google has about 1,200 employees in England and made £395 million in revenue there last year (that’s just under $620 million). It did, however, only pay £6 million in taxes in England last year. Unsurprisingly, that’s not sitting well with a number of British politicians and according to The Independent, Google could face a more formal investigation into its tax schemes by next spring. → Read More
It may sound weird at first but it’s true. Jordan’s parlament has decided Wednesday to impose a tax as high as 1 Fils (a bit more than one tenth of $0.01 if I calculated that correctly) per minute for phone connections and 1 kilowatt hour of electricity.
The aim of the law is to raise $18.5 million to subsidize loans for people in the Arabian country who need to buy farm animals such as sheep. → Read More
It’s all over, folks. Fortune is reporting that the state of New York’s sales tax on goods purchased at Amazon.com starts this Sunday, June 1st. Peter’s already been enraged about it here and here and I’m guessing he’s not going to be too thrilled about this post either. He’s pretty excitable as it is, so hopefully he won’t read this. The state’s… → Read More
Get this. It turns out that various parts of the music industry are very, very greedy. I know, I was shocked too! The Music Business Group (the UK’s version of the RIAA, basically) is proposing that music creators and rights owners should be entitled to profits from anything that facilitates you ripping a CD to your computer — anything used for “format shifting,” as… → Read More
Well, isn’t this some muthafricking bullhockey. The NY legislators approved a statewide sales tax last week that requires online retailers to collect tax for purchases shipped to the state. That includes online retailers that have no physical existence in the state. NY Governor David Paterson is expected to sign off on this. “This is a first step — but a critical one — in our… → Read More
The TurboTax forums lit up yesterday as hundreds of frustrated filers tried to press submit but only got server capacity issues. Hrmmm… the IRS only allows e-filing through CPAs or certain web services and those web services fail dismally. Sounds like the efficiency of the private sector at work! A typical post? Okay, so the deadline has come and gone and I still cannot get my filings to go… → Read More
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