The Public Accounts Committee will grill Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs officials, and Google executives during a hearing on February 11 on matters of corporate tax deals. There have been calls for Google and other giant national corporations to pay more taxes, as HMRC is facing the controversial £130million 'sweetheart' tax deal it made with Google.
According to the Telegraph, Margrethe Vetager, EU's Competition Commissioner, said she would probe the Google deal to find out if it broke certain state aid rules. Meanwhile, the National Audit Office is also considering a probe on the matter. The Government is under heavy criticism over the £130million 'sweetheart' tax deal that covered Google's ten year tax period from 2011.
"If we find there is something to be concerned about, if someone writes to us and says, 'This is maybe not as it should be', then we will take a look," said Vetager in a report by the Standard. The shadow chancellor John McDonnel formally asked her to do a probe on Google, HMRC and the £130million 'sweetheart' tax deal.
The chancellor said, "After a week in which George Osborne has hid from our calls for transparency and scrutiny over his tax deal with Google... we need to ensure that the deal the Chancellor struck was not one that undermines our tax system and is not a deal that fires the gun on a new race to the bottom of corporation tax in Europe."
Meanwhile, Google lashes back at these accusations, saying, "What should Google pay in the UK?" Its European public office affairs chief Peter Barron defended the tax deal, saying that as a US-based company, it pays most of its taxes in America, which according to the Daily Mail reached $3.3 billion last year.
However, Chancellor George Osborne said on Friday that the tax deal is a "major success." He said this during the announcement of the deal at Davos, Switzerland in font of global businesses and political leaders.
