Google pays tax on larger small share of NZ income

Google published its New Zealand accounts for the year to December 31,2019 earlier today.

According to the company’s financial statement Google’s 2019 revenue was NZ$36.2 million. That’s more than double the $17.5 million it made in 2018.

Sales and marketing expenses for the year were $20.4 million. This compares with a shade over $3 million in the previous year.

Which leaves the company with a 2019 profit of $10.6 million. In 2018 the profit was $0.6 million.

More Google tax

It means Google pays more New Zealand company tax than in the past.

Google says its 2019 tax bill is $3.6 million. In the financial statement the income tax expense is listed as $2.5 million. Apparently the lower number is the tax paid during the 2019 year, while $3.6 million represents the total tax the company will pay.

It’s a lot more tax than in the past. Google paid around $400,000 for the previous year.

Yet it is nothing like the whole story. While Google may have booked $36 million of New Zealand revenue in 2019, the figure is only a small fraction of the total amount of business it did in the country.

Does not include everything

A simple back of an envelope calculation shows Google will have booked a total of well over $NZ500 million in advertising last year. The company also has a cloud computing operation, although that is small compared to its advertising business.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) estimates Google made around A$3.7 billion in Australia in 2018.

In 2018 Google changed the way it does business in New Zealand to what it calls its ‘reseller model’. Before that the local office was financed out of the Singapore operation.

Governments around the world are moving to close the loopholes that let tech giants like Google and Facebook avoid paying full local taxes in the countries where they do business. The US government objects to this.

New Zealand’s government has said it hopes to be part of an international approach to the tax problem and will work with the OECD. This has been slow to date and many countries, including Australia, are moving to introduce a digital services tax.