Interestingly, here in Belgium, the press often states that Google pay his taxes as requested by the law. And that Google have some very expert accountant who read the law in suach a way that those taxes are close to zero.
I'm afraid Google doesn't pay his taxes like we, the tax payers, think it should...
Of course, that's totally proof-less, but well, I've heard that quite often (cf. intérêts notionnels)...
> Google declares little profit in Ireland because the unit there sends almost all of the profit earned from the non-U.S. clients to the Bermudan affiliate, in the form of licence fees for the use of Google intellectual property.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/30/google-taxes-overse...
> Google Inc. avoided about $2 billion in worldwide income taxes in 2011 by shifting $9.8 billion in revenues into a Bermuda shell company, almost double the total from three years before, filings show.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-12-10/google-rev...
I am sure the same could be said of every company beyond certain size (200-300 employees comes to mind, but this is just a wild guess), regardless of industry.
This is even the same for individuals. If you try to file taxes yourself (or have your employer do it for you, if possible), you will end up paying a higher rate than if you had taken the good sense of forking $100USD to some accountant to give you some basic advice. Of course this only works if you are wealthy enough that those $100US are marginal compared with what you would end up paying in taxes using the DIY approach.
(I'm Belgian)
The fact that corporate entities are able to shift their profits to places with favorable tax regimes mean that the calculations about the assumptions about increased tax receipts from business activity generated by publicly funded research are at least partially wrong.
Edit: Sorry if this came off as rude, was not intended.
This clued me in as to why someone might call google 'he.'