Report: Google Could Face UK Tax Inquiry After Just Paying 1.5% Last Year
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.
Google bases its international operations in Ireland, where corporations pay a tax rate of just 12.5%. Using a legal tax loophole called “Double Irish,” the company can move a large chunk of its UK profits to Ireland and then Bermuda. There, of course, the company pays even less tax.
According to the Independent, Google’s Irish subsidiary basically employes Google UK as an agent. Because of this, Google’s UK revenue goes straight to Ireland. The Irish headquarter then pays Google UK a 10% fee and, “once costs have been deducted,” that’s all Google UK pays taxes on.
It’s worth noting that the £6 million Google paid for 2011 is significantly more than it ever paid before. In the six previous years, Google only paid £8 million in total. The company has recently made a larger push into England and expanded its engineering team there by about 40% last year.
Here is Google’s statement regarding this matter:
We make a substantial contribution to the UK economy through local, payroll and corporate taxes. We also employ over a thousand people, help hundreds of thousands of businesses to grow online and invest millions supporting new tech businesses in East London. We comply with all the tax rules in the UK.
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This Euro 2012 Twitter data visualization tool reveals public sentiment around each England player
With the 2012 European football championships now in full swing, the good folk at social media monitoring company Brandwatch created this neat little data visualization Web tool, which reels in what people on Twitter are saying about each of the England players.
The “listening tool” tracks millions of tweets to show what tweeters have been saying about the England squad, updating the chatter in real-time as people take to the microblog to voice their opinions.
You simply hover over a player to see what people are saying about him, as I’ve done here with Andy Carroll. Kudos to the folk at Brandwatch for attempting accurate illustrations of each player, as you an see with Carroll’s ponytail here:
Users can also bring the referee character to life by tweeting a message with the hashtag #betheref, while the commentator icon contains the latest news from the tournament. Brandwatch has also created an equivalent that monitors the Germany national football team.
If nothing else, this is a good example of how, with the right presentation, social data can be aggregated and used to give a good overview of national sentiment around an event. Though the one flaw with such tools is that those who use Twitter are still only a fraction of the overall football-loving public, and thus may not be entirely representative.
➤ Euro 2012 Data Visualization
Here is the original post: This Euro 2012 Twitter data visualization tool reveals public sentiment around each England player