This refrain is so tiring. There exist tax laws. They follow laws and pay the taxes they are supposed to. You can dislike the tax laws on the books but to expect that a company is going to willingly pay more than the law requires is absurd.

It's not half as tiring as the insistence that companies like Google follow the law and pay the taxes they are supposed to even in cases where courts have specifically ruled that they haven't. You can accept that corporations aim for tax efficiency without pretending that creating imaginary entities to pay imaginary royalties to or pretending that sales of UK eyeballs to UK companies by UK-based commissioned sales reps were actually completed in Ireland is simply paying what the law requires rather than actively subverting the relevant law.

They do not evade taxes, that is illegal. They pay what is legally mandated.

Not using tax strategies when you are major corporation with millions of shareholders would not be in the interests of the company and it is silly to expect them to voluntarily pay more, especially for some subjective belief on what the "right" amount is.

If you would like them to pay more then change the law to make them do so.

So if Google paid more taxes than necessary (legal loopholes), there would be no fines (for bad privacy etc.)? That sounds wrong.

I don't support the legal tax loopholes but don't think there should be much relation between legal taxes and fines for bad practices (unless ofcourse the bad practice is illegal tax evasion).

I was merely suggesting the "more fines than taxes" bar in this article was artificially low because of their artificially low tax rate.

Note that I am fully in support of the EU's fines for both Google's antitrust violations and their privacy abuses, and agree that they should have no bearing on taxation.

This version of statement I can agree with (since its just facts). The original statement didn't read anything close to this imho :-)

> So if Google paid more taxes than necessary (legal loopholes), there would be no fines (for bad privacy etc.)? That sounds wrong.

I doubt there would be no fines; but if Google were paying a "fair" amount of taxes then there would be less of an adversarial relationship with governments: huge fines would be like harming the goose that lays golden eggs.

With Google's current tax avoidance/evasion they're just a regular, tasty-looking goose.

Do they evade taxes or just avoid them?

Did you have sex with that lady, or did she just give you a blow job?

More like "did you rape that lady or was it consensual?"