A senior Google executive has told MPs that he understands public anger over reports of the internet giant's tax payments, but insisted it paid tax at 20% like any other company operating in the UK.

But Matt Brittin came under attack from the chairwoman of an influential House of Commons committee after he told her he did not know how much he was paid.

Public Accounts Committee chairwoman Meg Hillier told the Google president for Europe, the Middle East and Africa that he must have "tin ears" if he did not understand how ordinary taxpayers would be angered by his comments and Google's £130 million tax settlement with HM Revenue and Customs for 10 years' operations in the UK.

As the committee subjected Mr Brittin to a grilling in Westminster, he confirmed to Ms Hillier that Google had made profits of £106 million on revenues of £1.18 billion in the UK in the last 18 months alone, and that 11% of the company's global sales to customers occurred in the UK.

Ms Hillier told him: "We are here for the taxpayers in Britain. Do you hear the anger and frustration out there that with these huge figures, you settled for a figure of £130 million."

She demanded four times to be told what Mr Brittin was personally paid, but he responded: "I don't have the figure but I will happily provide it."

Ms Hillier responded: "You don't know what you get paid? ... Out there, taxpayers, our constituents, are very angry, they live in a different world clearly to the world you live in, if you can't even tell us what you are paid.

"It seems a bit of a PR disaster if you didn't have the nous to realise in the same week that taxpayers were filing their tax returns, and sweating over a little bit of bank interest and getting it in on time, and you announce this as a good deal."

Mr Brittin responded: "I understand the anger and understand that people when they see reported that we are paying 3% tax would be angry. But we're not. We're paying 20% tax."

The £130 million figure was "the conclusion of a six-year rigorous, independent tax audit in which we are paying tax at 20% like every other UK company", he said. "We are paying tax at 20% on the activities in the UK."

Google Inc's vice-president Tom Hutchinson told the committee that the £130 million paid to HMRC included £18 million interest, but did not include any fines or payments under George Osborne's diverted profits tax - nicknamed the Google Tax.

The figure was the largest tax settlement following audit ever paid by Google outside the US, and the company believed it was "fair", he said.

And he revealed that the company had paid unspecified additional sums on top of the £130 million in relation to operations in 2004 - before the 10-year period under audit - as well as changes in the way Google dealt with stock-based compensation for tax purposes.

Mr Hutchinson told the committee: "We went through an extensive audit, HMRC went through all the facts, they talked to our customers, talked to our engineers and they determined this was the amount we had to pay. It was higher than we paid on returns, so we had a think about whether it was a fair amount and we decided it was."

Mr Brittin told the committee that Google had not co-ordinated the announcement of its tax settlement with Mr Osborne - who hailed it at the time as a "victory" for the Government. He insisted that the timing was driven by the fact that it would soon be made public in the company's accounts.

"Some of the characterisation in the time since has suggested some kind of a deal," he said. "I want to be very clear - this is the result of an independent process and it's the amount of tax we were required to pay. It's not a deal and there's been no political involvement in the HMRC process."

He acknowledged the company had met Government ministers on a number of occasions, but insisted: "We have never sought or had a meeting about the tax audit with any Government minister." The agenda for meetings was dominated by issues such as child safety online, counter-terrorism and security, he said.

Asked whether Google's tax arrangements had been discussed during meetings with ministers, Mr Brittin said: "I'm sure, given the scrutiny we have had, tax will have come up from time to time as a question. The main thing we would have been saying is that we would support simplification and want to be paying the right amount of tax and to be seen to pay it."

Mr Brittin told the committee that Google's workforce in the UK had grown from 160 to more than 4,000 over the 10-year period covered by the settlement, but was still smaller than the 5,000-plus employed in Ireland, where orders from Europe, the Middle East and Africa are dealt with.

He said that corporation tax was not levied on sales but on the value of economic activity. Much of the economic value driving sales in the UK was created by 20,000 engineers writing code in the US, he said.

Mr Brittin told the committee: "You wrote a report suggesting we should pay tax proportionate to UK sales. If those were the rules, that's what we would do. But they are not the rules. The rules are we should pay taxes on the profit on economic activity."

He said Google had offered "full transparency" to HMRC, adding: "They spent six years understanding exactly what we do. They interviewed our staff here and interviewed our staff in Ireland. They looked at the systems and processes and legal contracts and they applied the law to the facts."

Mr Brittin said that HMRC had been given details of commission payments to UK staff, which campaigners have cited as proof that more economic activity was taking place in Britain than the company admitted.

He insisted that the channelling of funds through Bermuda "has no impact on the tax we pay in the UK" and is "a commonplace arrangement for American companies".

But committee member Stewart Jackson (Con, Peterborough) told him: "You have made a choice to avoid tax and you have set up structures so to do. There is an element here of `We are doing the UK taxpayer a favour by paying tax'."

And David Mowat (Con, Warrington South) said: "None of us believe you should be taxed on sales. Our concerns are not that you should be taxed on sales, but that you have come up wit a number of contrived mechanisms, such as the 'Double Irish', the 'Dutch Sandwich' and the use of Bermuda."

Ms Hillier (Lab, Hackney South and Shoreditch) told Mr Brittin: "Frankly, you are taxing my patience and the patience of the hard-working taxpayer out there...

"Don't you feel a bit embarrassed by the fact that you don't even know what you are paid? You are living on a different planet to most of our constituents."

Mr Brittin dismissed reports that tax authorities in Italy and France were set to secure much larger tax settlements from Google, telling the MPs: "Just like in the UK, there have a been a whole range of statements based on what people and politicians and others might like to see large companies pay.

"They are not related to a tax demand or an audit. They are just statements from politicians asking us to pay more money - politicians in many cases who, like this committee, would like to see a system where taxes paid are proportionate to sales. That's not the system we have to deal with."

The head of spending watchdog the National Audit Office, Sir Amyas Morse, told the committee that between 2013 and 2015 the total charges applied against UK profits going into Google's parent group had risen from £642 million to £1.178 billion.

And he told the Google executives: "While we are having this discussion, what's actually happening is that the rate of offtake from UK declared tax is going up and up."

Mr Hutchinson responded that the sums mentioned related to money paid to the UK entity by Google Ireland for "providing services", as sales to UK companies were invoiced in Dublin.

HMRC chief executive Dame Lin Homer denied that the organisation had been involved in Mr Osborne's declaration that the Google deal represented a victory.

"We don't write the Chancellor's press releases, I don't know exactly what he meant by his tweets", she said.

"We feel the work we have done ... is bringing about a change in behaviour. We are rather proud of that. If the Chancellor thinks that as well, that's a good thing."

Dame Lin denied that large companies like Google were given preferential treatment by the taxman, in comparison to small firms.

She told the Public Accounts Committee: "It is exactly the same system we apply to everyone. People who are in the area where we start with self-assessment, which includes small businesses as well as big, come to us and tell us the tax they think they should pay.

"With many small businesses, we will agree that and take that tax. With large businesses, at any one time, two-thirds of them we say `Before we agree that, we want to root about and make sure you are right'. In about 12% of smaller businesses we do that.

"We then apply exactly the same approach to expecting back payments and fines."

But HMRC's director general of business tax Jim Harra said that imposing fines on large companies was "quite a challenge", as taxmen have to prove not only that the self-assessment return was wrong - which he said it was in Google's case - but also that insufficient care was taken in preparing it.

Both HMRC and ministers accepted that the penalty legislation "doesn't work in relation to large businesses" because of the difficulty of proving insufficient care was taken, and measures in the Finance Bill will remove this requirement for companies which are "habitually aggressive tax planners and habitually understate their profits", he said.

Committee member Caroline Flint (Lab, Don Valley) told him taxpayers would find it "hard to believe" that Google had paid no fines, adding: "It seems if you have got hired guns in the form of lawyers and tax people, big companies can get away with it."

Mr Harra said that the £130 million recouped from the HMRC investigation represented "a very substantial amount" of the total £196.4 million paid by Google in corporation tax and interest over the 10-year period.

He said that there were already signs that the Diverted Profits Tax - introduced in 2015 to impose levies at a higher rate on sums believed to have been shielded from corporation tax - has changed big companies' behaviour.

"We already have seen large businesses becoming risk-averse as a result of that and starting to change their transfer pricing arrangements and paying more corporation tax so they don't have to pay diverted profits tax," said Mr Harra.

He was unable to give an estimate of the cost of the Google investigation - which was considerably longer than the average of 22 months. But he said that the yield of tax from large companies as a result of such inquiries was typically 75 times larger than the cost.

And he said: "Conducting a six-year audit is a very expensive and resource-intensive process for us which I wish we didn't have to undertake."

Mr Harra said that the length of the investigation was due in part to the fast-moving development of the internet industry: "It is the nature of digital companies like Google that over time their scale and their business model and the way they and their customers behave change all the time.

"That means we can't just look at one year and extrapolate that to other years. We have to look at each year individually."

Mr Brittin later clarified that the company was paying 20% tax on its profits from activities in the UK.

Mr Hutchinson insisted Google ended up "paying the amount of tax that we think is a reasonable amount".

But Tory MP Richard Bacon said: "Why did it take you six years, as long as the Second World War, to explain your activities adequately to HMRC?

"If it takes six years to explain, either you are very bad at explaining or they are very thick at understanding."