HM Revenue and Customs

The Public Accounts Committee, the British Parliament’s public spending watchdog, has criticized the £130M ($185M) tax deal Google struck with the UK government as “disproportionately small.” The committee also criticized the secrecy around how the sum was calculated, reports the Guardian.

Google’s controversial tax deal cannot be properly assessed by MPs because of secrecy surrounding the negotiations, according to a report by parliament’s public spending watchdog. But the deal to pay £130m in back taxes for a 10-year period seems “disproportionately small when compared with the size of Google’s business in the UK”, the public accounts committee has found.

A report published today calls for more to be done to prevent “aggressive [tax] avoidance” by multinational companies, with Google accused of hypocrisy …

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The UK tax body, Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC), has completed a successful trial of Google Apps and will be rolling out the service to more of its staff throughout the year, reports The Register.

HMRC has 70,000 staff, and as such will be Whitehall’s first mass deployment of Google’s cloud services […]

David Fitton, head of public sector sales for Google UK, wrote on Linkedin: “The acceptance by HMRC that they can store official information offshore in Google data-centres represents a major change and endorsement of Google’s approach to managing sensitive information.”

HMRC said that it had “carefully considered the protection of customer information” when making the decision … 
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