Google defends UK tax payments

By Michael Sercan Daventry

LONDON

Google defended the amount of U.K. tax it pays after criticism of a recent settlement for underpaid duty covering the past decade.

In a sometimes-heated committee hearing at the House of Commons on Thursday, Google’s president for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, Matt Brittin, told lawmakers that the Internet search giant pays a “fair” amount of tax in Britain.

The £130 million ($186 million) deal concluded between U.K. tax authorities and the Internet search giant in January covered unpaid taxes for the past decade.

However, the figure was dwarfed by Google’s British revenues, which The Guardian reported were more than £5 billion ($7.23 billion) in 2015 alone.

Public Accounts Committee chairwoman Meg Hillier told Brittin that regular taxpayers felt “anger and frustration” because the U.K. is Google’s largest market outside the United States.

But Brittin said Google paid the U.K.’s 20% corporation tax rate, which covers profits rather than sales.

He said: “I understand the anger and understand that people when they see reported that we are paying 3% tax would be angry. But we're not. We're paying 20% tax.”

There was laughter during the hearing after Brittin did not answer Hillier’s demand to know his personal salary, which she asked four times.

Brittin said he did not remember his salary off-hand but would reveal it later if the committee considered it “relevant”.

Last month the U.K. government had hailed the Google tax deal as a “major success”, but the European Commission said it would examine the settlement following a complaint from opposition parties.