Google Australia paid over $100m in taxes in 2019, settling its bill with the ATO
Google Australia handed $133m to the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) in 2019 as it caught up with back taxes following a pledge by the government to get multinational companies paying more tax.
In documents filed on Thursday, the company reported a profit before tax of $134m in 2019, a drop from $156m the previous year. However, Google also reported a 16% increase in advertising revenue for the period, pocketing $4.3bn from local advertisers.
Google paid $59m on $4.8bn of revenue – 1.23%
Does that seem right to you?
Tax is payable on profit not revenue.
Which is why you too are entitled to make tax deductions.
Can someone explain profit of $134m against gross revenues of $4.8bn and net revenues of $1.2bn? This doesn’t seems to stack up for me? What are Google’s Australian costs and why is the profit before tax so small? I’m guessing there is transfer pricing in here somewhere but if anyone has insight on this please do share.
Google it.
Revenue is not net profit
Google has no costs in Australia relating to their ad platform. No local support agents, no reps, not really any unique local infrastructure at all. It’s just the regional arm of a global platform. God knows how they’ve cobbled these numbers together as far as the cost side goes.
actually – they HAVE done some local advertising, no trouble accruing those costs locally, but I reckon that’s about it …
Google has loads of reps, support agents and so on in Australia, they even have engineers working on the product in this country.
Perhaps worth noting here that all of the current government support for many in our industry and others comes from TAX.
TAX pays for hospitals and bailouts and support for parents and children and the sick.
Tax is paid on profit, not revenue. Woolworths paid $668M in tax on $60Bn I’m revenue in 2019, that’s ~1%.
Real question is calculation of profit and what rests in Australia. Google (and the US government) would argue that almost if the profit should sit where the investment and risk sits in the US. Similar to BHP, should the profit sit in Australia where mining investment and risk sits, or in China where the product is sold.
Can’t have it both ways.
Not saying Google shouldn’t pay more tax, but bullshit, factually inaccurate comparisons need to stay confined to NewsCorp papers.
I might be a bit thick but seems to me that tax on revenue might be a more sensible system than tax on profit. Easier to track by country so might remove a lot of the dodging and put renewed focus on keeping costs low rather than reporting them high?