Death and Taxes: Score Another One for Google Innovation!

Bloomberg's Jesse Drucker has a great piece of news analysis, showing how Google manages to have a 2.4% tax rate by exploiting Irish law. Various (legal) financial finaglings let the company escape the much higher corporate taxes in its largest markets, the United States and United Kingdom. Talk about innovation!

Google Inc. cut its taxes by $3.1 billion in the last three years using a technique that moves most of its foreign profits through Ireland and the Netherlands to Bermuda.

Google's income shifting -- involving strategies known to lawyers as the "Double Irish" and the "Dutch Sandwich" -- helped reduce its overseas tax rate to 2.4 percent, the lowest of the top five U.S. technology companies by market capitalization, according to regulatory filings in six countries.

"It's remarkable that Google's effective rate is that low," said Martin A. Sullivan, a tax economist who formerly worked for the U.S. Treasury Department. "We know this company operates throughout the world mostly in high-tax countries where the average corporate rate is well over 20 percent."

The U.S. corporate income-tax rate is 35 percent. In the U.K., Google's second-biggest market by revenue, it's 28 percent. Google, the owner of the world's most popular search engine, uses a strategy that has gained favor among such companies as Facebook Inc. and Microsoft Corp.

The method takes advantage of Irish tax law to legally shuttle profits into and out of subsidiaries there, largely escaping the country's 12.5 percent income tax.

Read the full story at Bloomberg.