Google pays 326 million euros and, by doing so, closes a dispute with the Italian tax system, and gets thefiling of the proceedings by the Milan Public Prosecutor's Office, which was investigating for tax evasion. This is stated in a note signed by the prosecutor Marcello Viola.
The Mountain View company had already compensated the Italian tax authorities in 2017 with 306 million, thus closing the tax debts and rectifying situations from the previous 15 years. Last June, Google had instead been subjected to an assessment for the years from 2015 to 2019 and the investigations had revealed that the company had failure to declare and pay taxes on income produced in Italy.
The Prosecutor's Office closes the proceedings against Google
The Milan Public Prosecutor's Office "has submitted to the Preliminary Investigations Judge a request to close the proceedings" against "the Irish company Google Ireland Limited following the investigations delegated to the military of the Economic and Financial Police Unit of the Guardia di Finanza of Milan and at the end of the adhesion assessment procedure concluded by the company with the Revenue Agency for the years from 2015 to 2019", the note reads.
From the investigations "it emerged that the foreign company, with regard to the activities conducted on the national territory, had failure to declare and pay taxes on income produced in Italy through a hypothetical hidden permanent organisation of a material nature consisting of servers and the essential technological infrastructure for the functioning of the homonymous platform for the provision of digital services”.
In particular, the “failure to submit annual returns of the income produced in Italy and the failure to submit the annual tax substitute declarations, relating to the withholdings that Google Irl should have applied on the royalties paid to foreign companies belonging to the same Group, by reason of the use and exploitation, by the permanent establishment, of all the programs, algorithms, trademarks and intellectual property constituting, as a whole, the Google technology”.
During the investigations, "the entire economic activity carried out by the company was reconstructed, with particular reference to revenues obtained through the sale of advertising space, with consequent challenge to the failure to declare the significant income deriving from such operations".
Hence the agreement with the Italian tax authorities, with the payment “in a single solution” of 326 million euro.
