So George is going to introduce a Google tax. If only he knew I first wrote the Google tax story

Posted on

George Osborne is, apparently, going to introduce what he has always said is impossible, which is a tax on Google's profits resulting from its habit of trading in the UK despite it claiming it has no real link with the country. I welcome that. I'll be keen to see how he does it.

He says the tax will raise hundreds of millions and if successful I would not disagree. But there is good reason for that. Back in 2009 I was the first person to investigate Google's tax abuse of the sort that became well known by 2011 and is know a given fact, worldwide. In that 2009 article I said the loss would be £100 million for just that one company way back then. So George is now doing what I have asked him to do all along in tackling this abuse, which was so easy to spot, but which his own officials have always denied is part of the tax gap (George: please note).

Now it's time he realised where to look when it comes to tax problems to be tackled and took a leaf out of my new report on the issue of where he should go next instead of waiting five years, as seems to be commonplace, next time.

Hat tip just for George: evasion is the next big thing and you have to invest in HMRC to solve it.


Thanks for reading this post.
You can share this post on social media of your choice by clicking these icons:

You can subscribe to this blog's daily email here.

And if you would like to support this blog you can, here: