<story><title>The Tax Haven That&apos;s Saving Google Billions</title><url>http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_44/b4201043146825.htm</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lionhearted</author><text>&amp;#62; That seems absurd by free enterprise standards and I am genuinely curious to know why refusing to do this would be called &quot;evil.&quot;&lt;p&gt;When taxes come up, it tends not to be a well-thought, cohesive, pros-and-cons thing. It tends to be an emotional/identity thing. Some people think and almost always argue it&apos;d be a good thing if companies gave more money over to governments.&lt;p&gt;Me, I think it&apos;s very good for the world on every level for Google to pay less taxes. They&apos;re hiring the best people, acquiring companies and giving liquidity to founders, run amazing free services (search, Gmail, Google Earth, Google Maps, Google Finance, Google News, Google Voice, Google Reader, Feedburner, many many others). Also, they&apos;re internally investing in energy and robotics like the auto-driven cars thing, and their high level personnel seem to invest really well too (like in genetics research). Anyone who thinks that England would do a better job with the money than Google hasn&apos;t been to England, or hasn&apos;t thought this through very much.</text></item><item><author>grellas</author><text>&lt;i&gt;Google is &quot;flying a banner of doing no evil, and then they&apos;re perpetrating evil under our noses,&quot; says Abraham J. Briloff, a professor emeritus of accounting at Baruch College who has examined Google&apos;s tax disclosures.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Maybe it is the lawyer in me, but why wouldn&apos;t any international business do whatever it could legally do to minimize its taxes? I understand that governments might want to consider these as loopholes and seek to end the right of U.S. taxpayers to avail themselves of these tax-minimization strategies. But, as long as it &lt;i&gt;is&lt;/i&gt; legal, why should a company voluntarily seek to expose itself to higher tax rates when it has the choice not to?&lt;p&gt;I guess when you as a company claim the high ground (&quot;do no evil&quot;), you will have people making their own judgments about what ethical standard ought to govern your conduct and this would explain this professor&apos;s remark. By that measure, though, one could argue that companies such as Google should seek to attribute all their revenues to California because that is where their main intellectual property development efforts have occurred and hence pay corporate tax rates at one of the highest rates around simply because they &quot;owe&quot; it to California.&lt;p&gt;I get this question all the time from web-based startups: why run our revenues through a high-tax state when we have the option of running them through all sorts of lower-tax venues and saving on taxes? The universal answer for smaller companies is &quot;set your company up in a way that let&apos;s you pay the least tax you can legally.&quot;&lt;p&gt;Why should Google be held to a different standard on penalty of having its perfectly legal actions castigated as &quot;evil&quot;? Is it the view of some or many in the HN community, for example, that a private enterprise has a form of &quot;social responsibility&quot; to voluntarily subject itself to the tax rates of whatever domicile it happens to have its major operations in (in this case, California) when it legally has the option not to do so? That seems unwise by free enterprise standards and I am genuinely curious to know why refusing to do this would be called &quot;evil.&quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>notahacker</author><text>The NHS employs a lot more people than Google and carries out research and development into saving people&apos;s lives. Sure, what Google does is great, but I&apos;m really not convinced that thinking up ever more creative outlets to display targeted advertising is necessarily a better outcome for society than spending the money on the UK public sector, which has many worthwhile projects of its own. I&apos;m going to go out on a limb here and say that sometimes multimillion sums are better spent on schools and hospitals than buying startups to wind up (big companies, like governments, have a tendency to overpay and make some blunders). The original article pointed out that Google owed its very existence to that paragon of state-sponsored inefficiency: the research university.&lt;p&gt;Calling it &quot;evil&quot; to carry out their fiduciary duty by legally shifting tax burden to the less well-off might be a stretch, but it&apos;s equally a stretch to suggest that we&apos;re better off because Google pays less tax. It&apos;s not as if they&apos;d be dirt poor if they paid a tax rate comparable to that of profitable startups...</text></comment>
<story><title>The Tax Haven That&apos;s Saving Google Billions</title><url>http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_44/b4201043146825.htm</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lionhearted</author><text>&amp;#62; That seems absurd by free enterprise standards and I am genuinely curious to know why refusing to do this would be called &quot;evil.&quot;&lt;p&gt;When taxes come up, it tends not to be a well-thought, cohesive, pros-and-cons thing. It tends to be an emotional/identity thing. Some people think and almost always argue it&apos;d be a good thing if companies gave more money over to governments.&lt;p&gt;Me, I think it&apos;s very good for the world on every level for Google to pay less taxes. They&apos;re hiring the best people, acquiring companies and giving liquidity to founders, run amazing free services (search, Gmail, Google Earth, Google Maps, Google Finance, Google News, Google Voice, Google Reader, Feedburner, many many others). Also, they&apos;re internally investing in energy and robotics like the auto-driven cars thing, and their high level personnel seem to invest really well too (like in genetics research). Anyone who thinks that England would do a better job with the money than Google hasn&apos;t been to England, or hasn&apos;t thought this through very much.</text></item><item><author>grellas</author><text>&lt;i&gt;Google is &quot;flying a banner of doing no evil, and then they&apos;re perpetrating evil under our noses,&quot; says Abraham J. Briloff, a professor emeritus of accounting at Baruch College who has examined Google&apos;s tax disclosures.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Maybe it is the lawyer in me, but why wouldn&apos;t any international business do whatever it could legally do to minimize its taxes? I understand that governments might want to consider these as loopholes and seek to end the right of U.S. taxpayers to avail themselves of these tax-minimization strategies. But, as long as it &lt;i&gt;is&lt;/i&gt; legal, why should a company voluntarily seek to expose itself to higher tax rates when it has the choice not to?&lt;p&gt;I guess when you as a company claim the high ground (&quot;do no evil&quot;), you will have people making their own judgments about what ethical standard ought to govern your conduct and this would explain this professor&apos;s remark. By that measure, though, one could argue that companies such as Google should seek to attribute all their revenues to California because that is where their main intellectual property development efforts have occurred and hence pay corporate tax rates at one of the highest rates around simply because they &quot;owe&quot; it to California.&lt;p&gt;I get this question all the time from web-based startups: why run our revenues through a high-tax state when we have the option of running them through all sorts of lower-tax venues and saving on taxes? The universal answer for smaller companies is &quot;set your company up in a way that let&apos;s you pay the least tax you can legally.&quot;&lt;p&gt;Why should Google be held to a different standard on penalty of having its perfectly legal actions castigated as &quot;evil&quot;? Is it the view of some or many in the HN community, for example, that a private enterprise has a form of &quot;social responsibility&quot; to voluntarily subject itself to the tax rates of whatever domicile it happens to have its major operations in (in this case, California) when it legally has the option not to do so? That seems unwise by free enterprise standards and I am genuinely curious to know why refusing to do this would be called &quot;evil.&quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Anechoic</author><text>&lt;i&gt;run amazing free services (search, Gmail, Google Earth, Google Maps, Google Finance, Google News, Google Voice, Google Reader, Feedburner, many many others). Also, they&apos;re internally investing in energy and robotics like the auto-driven cars thing&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;None of those products/services would be possible but for the government spending taxpayer money to develop the infrastructure behind those services (the internet, roads, GPS, etc).</text></comment>