UK Prime Minister David Cameron has asked Google’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, and other business leaders to be fair on paying tax in the country.
Cameron made the comments at a regular quarterly meeting of the government’s business advisory group attended by Schmidt at which corporate taxation was discussed.
A government source was quoted by Reuter as saying: "He said, on tax and transparency, that as part of having very low corporation tax he expects companies who are due to pay tax, to pay that tax."
Cameron’s comments follow the UK Public Accounts Committee‘s (PAC) finding that Google is manipulating its business in the country to avoid paying taxes.
PAC chairwoman Margaret Hodge said: "You are a company that says you do no evil and I think that you do do evil in that you use smoke and mirrors to avoid paying tax."
Apart from Google, there are several other high profile companies like Apple, Microsoft and Amazon.com are under scrutiny over low tax payment.
Google is reported to have generated more than $18bn in revenue from the UK sales between 2006 and 2011, but paid just $16m in taxes.
