Google tax
popular term used to refer to anti-avoidance provisions that have been passed in several jurisdictions dealing with profits or royalties that have been diverted to other jurisdictions with lower or nil rates
'Google tax' is a popular term used to refer to anti-avoidance provisions that have been passed in several jurisdictions dealing with profits or royalties that have been diverted to other jurisdictions with lower or nil rates.
Diverted profits tax
The UK and Australia measures took effect in advance of the Base erosion and profit shifting measures being considered at recent G20 summits.
United Kingdom
Effective for accounting periods beginning on or after 1 April 2015, the Finance Act 2015 imposes a levy on company profits—excluding those of small and medium-sized enterprises—that are routed via "contrived arrangements" to tax havens. The arrangements can concern either those that involve entities or transactions lacking economic substance, or efforts by a non-UK company to avoid a UK taxable presence. Companies that determine that they are subject to the tax have a statutory duty to notify Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs of that fact within three months after the end of the accounting period in question.
The UK tax is set at 6 percentage points above the headline corporation tax rate, or 31% of taxable diverted profits for a company with annual profits over £250,000 (55% with respect to ring fence profits), and was in 2014 forecast by UK Treasury to Raise £350m annually by 2017–18.
The Confederation of British Industry (CBI) described the effort to impose taxation on diverted profits as "a real concern for global business". Chas Roy-Chowdhury, head of taxation at the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA), said, "It's a bit like reporting yourself to the police and then having to defend yourself."
Amazon announced in May 2015 that it will start paying tax in the UK on British retail sales rather than booking sales through Luxembourg, this will mean the group will not have to pay the diverted profit tax.
Australia
The term has similarly been applied to the Tax Laws Amendment (Combating Multinational Tax Avoidance) Act 2015 introduced in the May 2015 budget, which received Royal assent in December 2015. The provisions came into effect on 1 January 2016 "in connection with a scheme, whether or not the scheme was entered into, or was commenced to be carried out, before that day.
“Google tax” enters the record as popular term used to refer to anti-avoidance provisions that have been passed in several jurisdictions dealing with profits or royalties that have been diverted to other jurisdictions with lower or nil rates. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Google, popular and term can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3516323. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2015, 2014, 2017 and 2016.
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This entry incorporates text from “Google tax” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.