Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Mobile
  3. News

More than 100 tax investigators storm Google’s Paris headquarters

Google spokesperson says company is cooperating fully with Paris authorities

Julian Chokkattu
By

Trusted Contacts
Image used with permission by copyright holder
Google’s Paris headquarters was raided by French authorities as a part of an ongoing tax evasion investigation on Tuesday, according to French daily newspaper Le Parisien. The raid occurred around 5 a.m. local time in France’s capital (11 p.m. ET), and about 100 investigators took part. The investigation, which began in June 2015, extends into tax evasion and money laundering, according to Reuters.

Updated on 05-29-2016 by Lulu Chang: Analysis of data collected from raid could take years

Recommended Videos

And while authorities are now in possession of Google’s data, it could “possibly take years” to analyze, said French financial prosecutor Eliane Houlette on Sunday.

Related

In an interview with Europe 1 radio, the prosecutor revealed that 96 individuals were involved in the raid, and that officials “have collected a lot of computer data.” But, Houlette continued, “We need to analyze (the data) … (it will take) months, I hope that it won’t be several years, but we are very limited in resources.”

Google, for its part, has thus far maintained its innocence.

“We comply with the tax law in France, as in every other country in which we operate,” a Google spokesperson told Digital Trends. “We are cooperating fully with the authorities in Paris to answer their questions, as always.”

Earlier this year, French officials said the government was seeking nearly $1.76 billion in back taxes from Google, and complained about the firm’s aggressive tax avoidance techniques. Tech giants like Apple, Facebook, Yahoo! and Google are notorious for using loopholes in U.S. tax laws, and in other nation’s laws, by parking cash in offshore havens to avoid paying their share of taxes.

Common methods used by these companies include the “Double Irish” and the “Dutch Sandwich,” which has one company sending its profits through an Irish company, which then routes the money to a Dutch company, and the Dutch company then sends it to a second Irish company based in a tax haven.

In early April of this year, a blimp floated around Google’s Tel Aviv headquarters, and read, “Google must pay tax.”

In January of 2016, Google agreed to pay $185 million in back taxes to the U.K. The settlement ended a six-year investigation by Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, and the company said it would reform its tax practices, and that it “will now pay tax based on revenue from U.K.-based advertisers, which reflects the size and scope of our U.K. business.”

Apple is also facing a European tax investigation, which could force the company to pay more than $8 billion in back taxes.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Julian Chokkattu
Julian Chokkattu
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Julian is the mobile and wearables editor at Digital Trends, covering smartphones, fitness trackers, smartwatches, and more…
Google Fi: Phones, plans, pricing, perks, and more explained
project fi

In 2015, Google launched Project Fi, a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) compatible with Nexus and Pixel smartphones (and the Motorola Moto X4). Three years later, the company announced the project had been brought directly under Google's branding with a name change to "Google Fi." Since then, Google's MVNO has gone from strength to strength, and today, it is compatible with the majority of Android devices, and it even works with iPhones.

Here's everything you need to know about Google Fi, including plan pricing, phones that are compatible with Google Fi, and more.
Google Fi at a glance

Read more
In Google’s new world, your phone camera is for way more than taking photos
Google Pixel 4a 5G

If you’re like most people, you probably use your phone’s camera to snap vacation photos, brag about your latest kitchen creations, and obsess over your pets and kids. How cute. If Google has its way, you might as well be using a $3,000 commercial gas range to boil water for mac and cheese.

At Google I/O 2021, the company’s annual developer conference, the software behemoth showed off a range of new apps and tools that treat your smartphone camera less as a humble memory maker, and more as a supercharged tool for interacting with the world around you.

Read more
Google Photos now shows more of the photos you want, fewer of the ones you don’t
Google Photos

Google detailed a selection of feature updates to Google Photos during the Google I/O 2021 keynote presentation, starting with an incredible statistic: There are 4 trillion photos and videos stored in Google Photos, an astonishing number, but the vast majority are never viewed.

Google is using A.I. to make sure the memories you’ve made and stored in Google Photos don’t get forgotten. It begins with an approach it calls Little Patterns. When it finds three or more photos that look similar, including shapes and colors, machine learning puts them together into a single story. Google showed a demonstration where it identified someone wearing a distinctive orange backpack, which was featured in multiple photos of a hiking tour, that was ready to be collected into a new story.

Read more