“We comply with all the tax rules in the UK,” a Google spokesman said  “We make a big contribution to the UK economy by employing over a thousand people, helping hundreads of thousands of businesses to grow online and investing millions supporting new tech businesses in East London.”

Google's European HQ is in Ireland where corporate taxes are low. Google UK also pays a licensing fee that amounts to billions of Euros to its Bermuda subsidiary. This helps to lower its tax burden in the region. In the filing on Tuesday, Google UK reported a loss after tax of £24.1m. If you remove the employee share allocation cost of £51.45m the subsidiary had a profit of £27m. In May, Google reported a loss in Australia and so paid only $74,176 in corporate taxes, down from $1.1m in the previous year. New Zealand also operated with loss so they contributed with $109.00 in tax.

[Ed – Although we disagree with Google’s efforts reduce their tax burden with these methods it should also be pointed out that almost every company participates in this. They have all worked very hard to ensure the laws support this type of behavior. The situation has been created through both corporate desire to maintain profits and politicians desire to have these companies in their districts. To say the issue is complicated it a gross understatement of the situation.]


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