‘Operation Tulip’ Takes Prosecutors Offline for Google Tax Raid | Hacker News Reader

‘Operation Tulip’ Takes Prosecutors Offline for Google Tax Raid

bloomberg.com

38 pointsJerry251 comments

> "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?

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.

Do you think Google has the ability to send armed men to engage in violence against the French tax office?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_militar...

Technically, yes they could. And if the private sector really is more efficient, they shouldn't need the whole 50 billion. I guess what I'm saying is it would be an interesting novel that I hope never happens in real life.

this seems nonsequitur. i doubt they were suggesting that google was literally incapable of hiring mercenaries or whatever.

Yes, it was intended that way. The entire digression is. :)

Google wouldn't hire mercs anyway, they'd probably use drones and robotics and AI.

Our bosses at Google told us specifically they have no intention of creating an army of killer robots. Repeatedly.

Do you think Google's French office has 500 billion in resources? You can't compare the worth/resources of the entire company of Google worldwide to a branch of the French government. You either compare the local Google office to the French tax office or the country of France to the worldwide company of Google. Otherwise it's just designed to be deceitful.

Additionally, Google doesn't get to show up with armed men and take things out of the offices of the French government.

Google can't fine anyone, they can't deport and they can't put you in jail - a government can.

Additional several years of work are worth less than 200k euro? Either these tax people are not paid well, or they cannot calculate.

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.

> 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.

My wife is in law school. The work software can do is still severely limited. I personally think we are on the cusp of a revolution in this, but we aren't there yet. Watson could probably do it, if it were as important as doctoring.

Software has made major strides. The old way of sending multiple copies between sides to be hand redone for each change required stupid amounts of labor. Now we have Word. But understanding the importance of particular documents still requires humans. For now.

Thanks for the context. I appreciate it!

> Watson could probably do it, if it were as important as doctoring.

I initially read that with the alternative meaning of doctoring, which is is a rather amusing take on it.

IBM actually has a system trained on a legal corpus, used for tracking down potentially-relevant case and statute law. There isn't a huge amount of client funding in legal AI compared to other applications, and the problems are much harder than more restricted domains like medicine and pharma, but there's enough cash to do some interesting work.

Yes, software can make discovery a lot more efficient.

Apparently they're not willing to pay for it.

> Investigators have “limited” technological means and would need “extremely efficient software” worth about 200,000 euros to speed up their work.

Maybe Google has a solution... err, wait...

Would be funny if they'll use Google's software in the future to parse the legal documents that were confiscated in the raid.

Isn't this an opportunity for a technologically savvy law firm to help the tax office take on the hard work in return for a % of the settlement? We pay whistleblowers rewards for ratting out tax evaders, why wouldn't we pay for expertise if it means increasing the chances of winning. 50% is better than 0% if it means giving them a fighting chance.

I think automated discovery software for tax law is still probably very limited in capability.

I've seen some forensic accounting software that is quite good at uncovering illicit transactions, however in this case they need to prove that Google didn't violate the law but intentionally abuse it so I don't know what they'll even be looking for.

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.

I don't know about that. Do you think they were going to use Google Docs?

Google docs or a physical unconnected legacy word processing machine. Truly these are the only options.

I'll get my WordPerfect floppies!

Is France hitting the other big companies with tax shelters or singling out Google for some reason? I'm not sure.

It's not just Google. McDonald's, too.

http://nytimes.com/2016/05/27/business/french-tax-officials-...

Any other tech companies like Microsoft or Apple? Apple also uses Irish dodge plus its stored profits are always in the news. I'd be surprised if they didn't go after them.

So only American companies?

Do you really think the french tax office just ignores domestic french tax evasion?

No. The french tax office does not exist solely to go after American companies. America giving these companies a free pass to pay little to no tax is ridiculous. They are stealing from your society.

What French or non-American companies are they hitting for over a billion dollars? So far, we have Google (U.S.) and McDonalds (U.S.). In the past, Europe pulled same stuff on Microsoft but I don't remember if it was E.U. or what country.

Worked offline for over a year?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

"extremely efficient software worth 200,000 euros?"

what could this be referring to?

https://www.google.com/work/search/products/gsa.html

An offering from Palantir perhaps?

A guess: they have payment, display, and click logs for adwords + adsense purchased in or targeting France, and want to calculate some sort of revenues...

What plugin should I install on Chrome to block various websites' popups asking me to turn off my adblocker?

uBlock Origin

<strike>I'm running uBlock Origin and still getting the notification about adblocker. They seem to be running some sort of detection mechanism.</strike>

I was running standard uBlock and didn't realize it. Origin seems to bypass the detection.

Hrmmmm, running uBlock Origin 1.7.2, and got hit by it.

Go to µBlock Origin settings, 3rd-Party Filters, check "Adblock Warning Removal List" and "Anti-Adblock Killer | Reek‎".

The fact that French authorities feel they are weaker than Google, well that's a deep concern to me.

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.

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.

If I ran Google I'd just up and leave France --it's been one thing after another with them.

And Google may have to pay 1.6 billion euros as taxes and fines: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-google-france-taxation-idU...

(yes, it was in February, but the investigation now is a follow-up)

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