A sandes holandesa

“In Google’s case, it generally works like this: When a company in Europe, the Middle East or Africa purchases a search ad through Google, it sends the money to Google Ireland. The Irish government taxes corporate profits at 12.5 percent, but Google mostly escapes that tax because its earnings don’t stay in the Dublin office, which reported a pretax profit of less than 1 percent of revenues in 2008.

Irish law makes it difficult for Google to send the money directly to Bermuda without incurring a large tax hit, so the payment makes a brief detour through the Netherlands, since Ireland doesn’t tax certain payments to companies in other European Union states. Once the money is in the Netherlands, Google can take advantage of generous Dutch tax laws. Its subsidiary there, Google Netherlands Holdings, is just a shell (it has no employees) and passes on about 99.8 percent of what it collects to Bermuda. (The subsidiary managed in Bermuda is technically an Irish company, hence the “Double Irish” nickname.)

All of these arrangements are legal. “Google’s practices are very similar to those at countless other global companies operating across a wide range of industries,” says Jane Penner, a company spokeswoman who declined to address the particulars of Google’s tax strategies.”

Artigo completo sobre a forma como as grandes multinacionais tecnológicas “fogem” legalmente aos impostos, aqui.