Ode To Capitalism

Google in Silicon Valley via Wikipedia.

Google uses a smart legal structure to reduce its overseas tax bill; it has saved the company $3.1 billion since 2007 and boosted last year’s overall earnings by 26%. Since 2007 the rate has been 2.4 percent – lower than its peers in the sector:

“In Bermuda there’s no corporate income tax at all. Google’s profits travel to the island’s white sands via a convoluted route known to tax lawyers as the “Double Irish” and the “Dutch Sandwich.” In Google’s case, it generally works like this: When a company in Europe, the Middle East, or Africa purchases a search ad through Google, it sends the money to Google Ireland. The Irish government taxes corporate profits at 12.5 percent, but Google mostly escapes that tax because its earnings don’t stay in the Dublin office, which reported a pretax profit of less than 1 percent of revenues in 2008.

Irish law makes it difficult for Google to send the money directly to Bermuda without incurring a large tax hit, so the payment makes a brief detour through the Netherlands, since Ireland doesn’t tax certain payments to companies in other European Union states. Once the money is in the Netherlands, Google can take advantage of generous Dutch tax laws. Its subsidiary there, Google Netherlands Holdings, is just a shell (it has no employees) and passes on about 99.8 percent of what it collects to Bermuda. (The subsidiary managed in Bermuda is technically an Irish company, hence the “Double Irish” nickname.)”

A good piece on how globalized capitalism works, there. Full story from BusinessWeek here.

Tags: Africa, Bermuda, Corporate tax, European Union, Google, Government of Ireland, Middle-East, Netherlands, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Tax