A senior member of the Australian Senate has accused Google of misleading one of its committees about the extent of the search company's earnings in Australia.
Senator Nick Xenophon clashed with Google's Australia and New Zealand managing director, Jason Pellegrino, at a Senate select committee on Tuesday, warning that he did not like being led up the garden path over revenue differences said to be in the billions, The Australian reported.
Information provided to the committee by Google put the search behemoth's Australian revenue at $1.1 billion last year.
Facebook, which was also represented at the hearing, put its earnings last year at $326 million.
{loadposition sam08}But Facebook admitted to another panel that it was still accounting to Australian revenue in Ireland, even though the Australian government has launched a crackdown on this practice.
Senator Xenophon told the ABC this morning that media and advertising analysts had put Google's revenue last year at about $3 billion and Facebook's at about $1 billion.
He said the Google figure of $1.1 billion defied credibility. "I don't think they are paying their fair share of tax," he said.
The Australian Government has been trying for the last few years to get multinational companies to pay tax on all the revenue they earn in the country.
According to a report from the investment bank Morgan Stanley, Google and Facebook took between $4 billion and $5 billion of Australian revenue last year.
Pellegrino said he was not in a position to offer any opinion on these estimates.
Senator Xenophon replied that he hated being misled and asked whether the $1.1 billion figure included money that was sent through overseas branches of the company.
The Google executive said that all revenue generated in Australia came through the Australian business.
When Senator Xenophon pressed Pellegrino as to whether the revenue earned by Google last year was closer to $3 billion, he responded that the company had a global policy of not reporting numbers in any specific country.
Facebook's head of journalism partnerships Aine Kerr told the panel that the company was paying US$1 million to 10,000 publishers across the world.
Senator Xenophon pointed out that this was just US$100 per publisher.
Photo: courtesy Senator Xenophon's website