Facebook's French subsidiary has agreed to pay more than 100 million euros (S$161.6 million) in back taxes, including a penalty, after a ten-year audit of its accounts by French tax authorities, the company said on Monday, reports The Business Times.
France, which is pushing hard to overhaul international tax rules on digital companies such as Facebook, Alphabet's Google, Apple and Amazon, has said the big tech groups pay too little tax in the country where they have significant sales.
Current international tax rules legally allow companies to funnel sales generated in local markets in Europe to their regional headquarters. Some of the tech companies, including Facebook, have European or international headquarters based in countries with comparatively low corporate tax rates, such as Ireland.
A Facebook spokesman said French tax authorities carried out an audit on Facebook's accounts over 2009-2018 period, which resulted in an agreement by the subsidiary to pay a total 106 million euros.
The Facebook spokesman did not elaborate further on the details of the agreement. France's tax administration also did not give more details.
As a result, Facebook's total net revenue almost doubled in 2019 from a year earlier to 747 million euros, a copy of Facebook France's 2019 annual accounts, filed with France's companies registry and seen by Reuters, showed.
Read more of this Reuters report published by The Business Times.