This week Sen. Chris Van Hollen introduced legislation to require big multinational corporations to tell shareholders and the public what they’re already telling tax authorities behind closed doors: how much income they’re booking in specific offshore tax havens and how little tax they’re paying to these jurisdictions.
Such disclosures would build on important, but limited, which allow researchers to know (for example) how much the Yum! Brands Corporation saved last year by moving its Pizza Hut intangible assets to Malta, or how Halliburton is pretending to earn profits in the Cayman Islands.
What the new U.S. rules don’t tell us is whether these companies have any employees or productive property in these tax havens, let alone how much income is being booked there. The Van Hollen bill (the “Disclosure of Tax Havens and Offshoring Act”) would fill that gap, allowing shareholders and the public to know which American corporations have based their profit maximization strategy on tax avoidance.
The bill’s introduction comes at a time of growing international consensus that offshore tax avoidance threatens the viability of the corporate income tax, and that ending this threat requires sustained multilateral cooperation. This consensus led to an agreement between the largest economies as members of the OECD to implement a global minimum tax on corporations, with country-by-country tax filing.
Many of our allies, such as Australia and the nations of the European Union, have moved to mandate country-specific disclosures. EU-based companies as well as non-EU companies that make substantial sales into the EU, must make public disclosures of income and tax expense starting in 2026. A handful of companies including Microsoft have already made their first such disclosures, and every other U.S. company with meaningful European sales must do so by the end of calendar year 2026.
The Trump administration has radically departed from this international consensus, choosing a so-called “side by side” approach to dealing with corporate tax avoidance under which the treatment of U.S. corporations would be largely the product of U.S. policy rather than international agreements. This is why now is an especially important time for Congress to require more detailed corporate tax disclosures.
Sen. Van Hollen’s legislation would create a set of disclosure rules that, while similar to the EU rules, would apply more generally to large U.S.-based corporations. The critical difference is that this bill would require companies to submit the information to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which would make it available to corporate shareholders, the media, and the general public in a single centralized location. In addition to basic information about income and taxes, the bill would require companies to disclose their employees and tangible assets on a country-by-country basis.
The stakes have never been higher for a clear public understanding of how U.S. corporations are abusing foreign tax shelters. Alphabet, a chronic income-shifter, is reporting quarterly earnings that are among the highest in recorded history, with an astonishing $77 billion of pretax income in the first three months of 2026. In that context, ensuring that companies are booking their income where it’s really earned can make a real impact on keeping the federal government’s lights on. The Van Hollen bill would make it much easier for Americans to know whether the businesses they patronize every day are boosting their record profits by shortchanging American taxpayers.
