Google’s Silicon Valley morality tale

Google is one of the leading players in a modern-day Silicon Valley morality tale, particularly now, since it is among the American multinationals using sophisticated international tax shelters to avoid paying billions of dollars in taxes.

According to Bloomberg, nearly $10 billion in revenue and $2 billion in taxes due disappeared into a Bermuda Triangle of shell corporations, offshore subsidiaries and clever accounting maneuvers such as the “Double Irish With a Dutch Sandwich”. Even for Google’s biggest fans, it’s now a fair question: Whatever happened to the unofficial company motto "Don't be evil"? To be fair, nothing Google did was illegal — the company simply executed well-known tax loopholes to perfection in the interest of maximizing returns to shareholders. Moreover, Google is hardly the only tech company caught with their Bermuda shorts pulled down around their ankles. Across Europe, there has been an outcry against tax-avoiding multinationals, with an emphasis on cracking down on the offshore tax activities of the tech world’s biggest players, including Amazon, Apple and Microsoft. In the UK earlier this month, British lawmakers took turns publicly admonishing the leaders of some of America's biggest companies, claiming that they aren’t paying their “fair share” of taxes. These are not just harangues from our cash-strapped European friends, they are evidence of a fundamental change to the way we view Silicon Valley’s most successful tech companies.