Google has agreed with the UK government to pay just pound 6m in corporation tax this year, despite earning almost pound 400m in revenues.
The Daily Telegraph revealed the sum after the Silicon Valley giant filed its accounts for its UK division at Companies House yesterday, which showed revenues of pound 395m.
The British side of the US firm is set to announce losses of pound 24.1m, but the newspaper claimed this figure was down to giving over pound 50m of shares to its own employees. When this figure is excluded, the reported profit for UK operations alone in 2012 stood at pound 27m.
Google has paid what seems a small figure for a number of years to the UK government, with just a pound 935,000 tax bill on pound 239m revenues last year and a total of pound 8m between 2004 and 2010.
Yet the firm continues to say it is sticking to the rules when it comes to UK taxes.
“We comply with all the tax rules in the UK,” said a spokesman from Google. “We make a big contribution to the UK economy by employing over a thousand people, helping hundreds of thousands of businesses to grow online and investing millions supporting new tech businesses in East London.”
Google reported its latest global results back in July, touting a 35% year-on-year to bring revenues to $12.21bn.
Vodafone’s tax bill came under scrutiny earlier this year when it was revealed it only paid pound 1.25bn to the government. Critics claimed it owed more than pound 6bn and that it had avoided paying by having a one-man staff in a tax haven office based out of Luxembourg.
However, the mobile company’s bill was deemed “reasonable” by the National Audit Office (NAO) in June, despite being almost pound 5bn less than expected.
