On Fri, Nov 23, 2012 at 10:02:58AM +1100, Aryan Ameri wrote:
On Thu, Nov 22, 2012 at 11:27 PM, Brent Wallis <brent.wallis@gmail.com>wrote:
2. Why do they pay less tax in Oz by more than half than what my company does? Say what? Don't be Evil? Really?
Well, I thought not paying more tax than you should is sign of how things should be.
and paying less tax than you should is theft. $74,000 tax from Australian revenues of approx $1 billion is nowhere near what they should be paying. that's a tax rate of < 0.000074% The company tax rate in australia is 30% - $74K is what they should have paid if their net income was $246K. so they've fiddled the books (i.e. offshored the income to bermuda via ireland and nederlands) to claim that on gross income of around $1B they only had a net income of $246K. google has subsequently claimed that they actually pay $780K in tax. if that's true, it still only shifts the decimal point one place for an effective tax rate of 0.00078% on revenues of approx $1B. or about the right amount for a pretend net income of $2.6M. even assuming ridiculously generous expenses (rent, salaries, bills etc) of 50% of gross income, they *should* be paying around $150 Million in tax. The correct figure is, of course, somewhere between $150M and $300M. google is, of course, not the only company to evade tax. they all do it. it doesn't make it right. it makes them all thieves.
In fact, I vaguely remember somewhere reading that directors of a public company have a responsibility to not waste money unnecessarily, something about corporate responsibility in the Corporations Act (2001) or something like that...
paying their fair share of the infrastructure that their business depends on to make money is not wasting money. craig -- craig sanders <cas@taz.net.au> BOFH excuse #408: Computers under water due to SYN flooding.