Good on you, Google – in praise of tax avoiders

Anyone who googled ‘tax avoidance’ this week will have been confronted (between adverts for accountancy firms) with endless stories about Google’s own tax avoidance schemes. If the company’s reputational management team was striving to stem the flood of bad publicity, it was not succeeding. Salvation for -Google arrived only when Apple’s tax avoidance became the big story instead.

That is what the internet has created: a sometimes frightening, uncontrollable world in which information flows from place to place almost instantly and (mostly) unimpeded. Few would deny, however that the internet has had a benign and enriching influence on our lives overall.

Government officials often become bogged down in discussions to promote free trade, but the internet allows producers and consumers to leap bureaucratic barriers. If you are in London and want to buy a book, a holiday or a packet of exotic seeds, you no longer have to wait for someone to import it for you; you can do the importing yourself. If the product is one that can be digitised, such as a piece of music or a book, there is no need for your product even to pass through a port. The world is becoming one big marketplace in which we can shop anywhere that we wish, at any time of day or night.

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Kristina Murkett

There’s an obvious reason pre-school children are falling behind

It ought to come as no surprise that paying tax has itself been revolutionised in this electronic, borderless environment. If you can move production and sales quickly around the world, then you move tax jurisdictions easily too. And yet an awful lot of people this week, from BBC reporters to US senators, seem to have been shocked at the financial ingenuity of Google and Apple. Did they really think that at the heart of these empires lay plodding accountants who hadn’t worked out how to make the best of international outsourcing? Or maybe they assumed that both companies were run by philanthropic CEOs who, in a spirit of generosity, had voluntarily decided to pay more tax than they knew they needed to.