The Government is beginning to apply the Google tax to Spanish companies with a turnover of more than 3 million euros.
The Tobin tax will mainly affect companies listed on the stock exchange for more than 1 billion euros
Spanish companies have to deal with two new taxes in 2021. The year has started without any big surprises for companies, since they knew last year that the Google tax and the Tobin tax would come into force in 2021. However, these taxes affect them unequally.
What is the Google tax?
The Google tax is a tax applied to digital services. Specifically, this tax levies a 3% tax on services such as online advertising, those related to online intermediation or the sale of data.
Contrary to what finland email list you might think, the Google tax does not apply to all companies. In Spain, it only applies to those with a turnover of 3 million euros. In the case of an international company, the turnover must be 750 million euros.
The Google tax will impose a 3% levy on services such as online advertising and the sale of data.
After several months of uncertainty, the BOE published in October 2020 the law on the Tax on Certain Digital Services (IDSD), also known as the Google Tax. We have to go back to 2018 to find the origin of this tax. At that time, international organisations such as the OECD, the G20 and the EU detected that large companies such as Amazon, Facebook or Google had been able to optimise their taxation.
Consequences of the application of the Google tax
As it turned out at the time, it was likely that large companies had shifted their profits to other states with lower corporate tax rates . In Spain the tax rate is 25% while in other states it can be reduced to 12.5%, as is the case in Ireland, for example.
With this in mind, the European Commission decided to present a project to prevent large companies from evading tax. In March 2018, a draft directive was presented, but it was rejected. It needed unanimity to be approved, and there were states such as Ireland, Denmark, Sweden and Finland that opposed it.
What happened then? Although there is an international consensus that regulation must be global, there are states that have drawn up their own rules.
This is the case in Spain. The government has opted to introduce its own tax figures. It is estimated that the tax deficit in Spain for companies in the technology sector such as Google, Facebook, Amazon and Netflix is around 20 million euros.