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‘Operation Tulip’ Takes Prosecutors Offline for Google Tax Raid

38 points| Jerry2 | 9 years ago |bloomberg.com | reply

51 comments

order
[+] clamprecht|9 years ago|reply
> "It's pretty much a fight between David and Goliath", [the prosecutor] said.

Really? France, a sovereign G8 nation, calling Google Goliath? How are they measuring size? Google's market capitalization is $500 billion, is this more valuable than the country of France?

[+] ljf|9 years ago|reply
Do you think the French Tax office has 500 billion in resources? Or 5? Likely to have a relatively tiny budget and teams compared to even just the legal teams at Google.
[+] tener|9 years ago|reply
Additional several years of work are worth less than 200k euro? Either these tax people are not paid well, or they cannot calculate.
[+] c-slice|9 years ago|reply
The last paragraph in the article is a real kicker: they're going to have to parse millions of documents to build their case. That's going to take an enormous amount of time and staffing costs. It'll be interesting to see this play out in the courts or if a settlement is reached before trial.
[+] toomuchtodo|9 years ago|reply
> That's going to take an enormous amount of time and staffing costs.

Is it? Can't they scan all of those docs in, OCR them (or process the electronic docs if they're already in that format), and use e-discovery? I hear so often on HN that legal firms no longer need junior associates or paralegals for that work, as the software can do the heavy lifting.

[+] epoxyhockey|9 years ago|reply
we worked with computers, but pretty much only with word processing

The article title sounds like a sensational excuse for an otherwise technologically unsavvy group of tax agency workers.

[+] chris_wot|9 years ago|reply
I don't know about that. Do you think they were going to use Google Docs?
[+] CyberDildonics|9 years ago|reply
Worked offline for over a year?

Did anyone ever think of the crazy solution of having one person properly configure a firewall?

[+] vixen99|9 years ago|reply
If tax evasion is proved then the law will take its course. Not to excuse it should this happen but I'd be intrigued to know by how much the French economy has benefited by the increased trade enabled by the Google search engine. Unanswerable question I guess.
[+] eru|9 years ago|reply
Not only in terms of Euros, but in terms of utility.

That was a big discussion about eg the impact of Wikipedia. Since users don't pay for it, but obviously derive lots of utility. The economy would grow in some real sense because of Wikipedia, but not always measurable in terms of GDP.

[+] kbenson|9 years ago|reply
Not to hijack the conversation, but I find it interesting that bloomberg almost has a good strategy for popup blocking people.

They present a dialog that says "We noticed that you're using an ad blocker, which may adversely affect the performance and content on Bloomberg.com. For the best experience, please whitelist the site." and a few second countdown before it goes away.

So, since they asked nicely, and it is their content, I turned off ublock for them, and reloaded. The page loads with the content aligned to the top, then a second later the content jumps down 200-300 pixels for a second leaving a white border at the top, then a second after that it jumps up half the size of the prior white border, because the ad that loaded is too small for the allotted area.

Congratulations on reinforcing the idea that all site advertising is bad. ublock has been restored on my end, and you've already exhausted the good will I was extending towards you with that move.

[+] waterphone|9 years ago|reply
It is their content, but it's your computer, and you get to choose what code runs on your computer. And adblockers aren't just blocking ads, they're blocking tracking scripts and malware and dozens or more performance-reducing requests per page.

I will never disable adblock for any site. If the site blocks me for blocking adblock, I will block their adblock blocker, or block the site entirely so I never mistakenly visit it again.

[+] Scoundreller|9 years ago|reply
What plugin should I install on Chrome to block various websites' popups asking me to turn off my adblocker?
[+] chris_wot|9 years ago|reply
The fact that French authorities feel they are weaker than Google, well that's a deep concern to me.
[+] icebraining|9 years ago|reply
Of course they would say that when they're looking for a budget increase of €200k to purchase this new “extremely efficient software”. Whether it's actually true that they feel weaker than Google can't determined from reading their PR.

  - There is to be a departmental reorganisation. A real reshuffle. We may get extra
    responsibilities.
  - Do we want them?
  - We want all responsibilities, Minister, if they mean extra staff and bigger
    budgets. It's the breadth of our responsibilities that makes us important,
    makes YOU important, Minister. When you see vast buildings, huge staff
    and massive budgets, what do you conclude?
  - Bureaucracy?
  - No, Minister, you conclude that at the summit there are men of great stature
    and dignity who hold the world in their hands and tread the earth like princes.
  - Yes, I see.
  - So each new responsibility must be seized eagerly and each old one guarded
    jealously. Entirely in your interests, of course, Minister.
[+] gambler|9 years ago|reply
Google is, at best, on par with them. What bother me isn't that, but how little power an individual has compared to either of those two entities.
[+] transfire|9 years ago|reply
If I ran Google I'd just up and leave France --it's been one thing after another with them.