Offshore Tax Avoidance
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report January 17, 2024 Ongoing Use of Offshore Tax Havens Demonstrates the Need for the Global Minimum Tax
Key Findings To avoid taxation, American corporations use accounting gimmicks that make profits appear to be earned in foreign jurisdictions which tax corporate profits very lightly or not at all.… -
blog May 7, 2023 Minnesota Poised to Enact Landmark Loophole-Closing Corporate Tax Reforms
With Minnesota poised to enact worldwide combined reporting of corporate income taxes, business lobbyists are pulling out all the stops to make state lawmakers believe the apocalypse is upon them.
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blog February 14, 2023 The No Tax Breaks for Outsourcing Act Is Needed More than Ever
The new corporate minimum tax enacted as part of last year’s Inflation Reduction Act will address some of the worst corporate tax dodging, but what else is needed? A group of Democrats have answered this question with the No Tax Breaks for Outsourcing Act.
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report July 16, 2020 Trade Deals Aren’t Enough: Fixing the Tax Code to Bring American Jobs Back
We all need the public sector to protect public health, keep us safe, educate our children, and much more. Companies, particularly multinational corporations, could not function without the legal, infrastructure, financial, regulatory, health, and transportation resources that the government provides.
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blog February 11, 2020 Why Today’s Congressional Hearing on “The Disappearing Corporate Income Tax” Is Imperative
The United States is collecting a historically low level of tax revenue from corporations. In 2018, corporate tax revenue as a share of gross domestic product (the nation’s economic output)… -
report February 5, 2019 Progressive Revenue-Raising Options
America has long needed a more equitable tax code that raises enough revenue to invest in building shared prosperity. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), enacted at the end of 2017, moved the federal tax code in the opposite direction, reducing revenue by $1.9 trillion over a decade, opening new loopholes, and providing its most significant benefits to the well-off. The law cut taxes on the wealthy directly by reducing their personal income taxes and estate taxes, and indirectly by reducing corporate taxes.
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blog November 29, 2018 New Legislation Aims to Change Tax Law Provisions That Incentivize Outsourcing
Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and several Senate co-sponsors this week introduced the Removing Incentives for Outsourcing Act, which curbs harmful new incentives created by the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) that encourage companies like GM to move their profits and operations offshore.
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blog November 5, 2018 New Report Finds Tax Transparency Is Not Just Ethical: It Has a Real Fiscal Impact
A new report by Hubertus Wolff and Michael Overesch finds that public country-by-country reporting (CBCR) can have a significant fiscal impact. In fact, the report shows that new CBCR rules applied to European banks appear to have substantially increased the tax rates paid by banks that engage in tax-haven activities. This means that CBCR may not just improve the integrity of the tax system and provide critical information so investors can gauge investment risks, but may also have a much more immediate impact on curbing tax avoidance.
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blog November 5, 2018 Post-TCJA, International Corporate Tax System Still Leaking Hundreds of Billions in Profits
A recently released working paper from Kimberley Clausing of Reed College finds that U.S. corporations will avoid taxes on nearly $300 billion in offshore profits every year for the foreseeable future. The paper provides an informative new look into the level of offshore tax avoidance before and after the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA). While advocates of the TCJA claimed the tax law would end tax haven abuse through lowering the statutory rate and other measures, Clausing’s analysis shows that the TCJA will still allow the vast majority of offshore tax avoidance to remain intact.
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blog September 7, 2018 New Study Confirms Offshore Earnings are Flowing into Stock Buybacks, Not Jobs and Investments
A new study by the Federal Reserve found that the evidence so far suggests that the new repatriation tax break has resulted in a surge in stock buybacks and little discernable impact in investment by its biggest beneficiaries, just as critics predicted.
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blog July 17, 2018 How to Fix the Broken International Corporate Tax Code
How should lawmakers fix the system? A new ITEP report breaks down how the international corporate tax code under the TCJA works, and how lawmakers can fix it. The report lays out three key principles for reform: equalize the rates, eliminate inversions, and create transparency.
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report July 17, 2018 Understanding and Fixing the New International Corporate Tax System
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) radically changed the international tax system. It slashed taxes on corporate income, both domestic and foreign. It encouraged U.S. multinational corporations to shift jobs, profits, and tangible property abroad, and keep intangibles home. This report describes the new international tax system—and its many gaps—and also provides a road map for how to fix these gaps and surveys recent legislative approaches.
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blog June 6, 2018 New Legislation Would Close Significant Offshore Loopholes in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act
One simple rule should drive the nation’s international tax policies: tax the offshore profits of American companies the same way their domestic profits are taxed. The latest legislation to approach that ideal is the Per-Country Minimum Act (H.R. 6015), from Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR). The DeFazio bill closes the loophole that allows corporations to use foreign tax credits to shelter profits in tax havens from U.S. taxes. No other bill addresses this.
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blog May 24, 2018 New Legislation Would End Tax Incentives to Move Jobs and Profits Offshore
New legislation introduced today, the No Tax Breaks for Outsourcing Act, by Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-TX) and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) would help repair the damage to the international tax code wrought by the new Trump-GOP tax law and move toward a system where U.S. corporations can’t reap tax benefits from shifting jobs and profits offshore.
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blog May 2, 2018 New UK Law May Shut Down the Biggest Tax Havens — Aside from the U.S.
The United Kingdom’s parliament has enacted a new law requiring its overseas territories — which include notorious tax havens like Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, and the British Virgin Islands — to start disclosing by 2020 the owners of corporations they register. This could shut down a huge amount of offshore tax evasion and other financial crimes because individuals from anywhere in the world, including the United States. have long been able to set up secret corporations in these tax havens to stash their money.
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blog December 19, 2017 The Trump-GOP’s Big Giveaway to Multinational Corporations
The tax bill just approved by Congress was a golden opportunity to solve these problems for good—but turned out to be a colossal missed opportunity. Instead of addressing the hundreds of billions in lost federal tax revenue due to offshore tax avoidance schemes, the Trump-GOP tax bill would forgive most of the taxes owed on the profits held offshore right now and open the floodgates to even more offshore profit-shifting in the future.
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report December 16, 2017 Multinational Corporations Would Receive $413 Billion in Tax Breaks from Congressional Repatriation Proposal
Rather than making companies pay what they owe, the final legislation reported out of conference proposes to tax accumulated offshore earnings at a rate lower than the 35 percent that they owe under current law. The final bill would tax offshore earnings being held as cash at a rate of 15.5 percent and tax all other offshore earnings at a rate of 8 percent. According to the Joint Committee on Taxation, this proposal would allow U.S. companies to collectively pay about $339 billion in taxes on their offshore earnings, rather than the roughly $752 billion that they owe, meaning that this proposal would give U.S. multinationals a tax break of $413 billion.
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blog November 21, 2017 The Senate Tax Plan’s Big Giveaway to Multinational Corporations
Instead of addressing the hundreds of billions in lost federal tax revenue due to offshore tax avoidance schemes, the Senate tax bill would forgive most of the taxes owed on these profits and open the floodgates to even more offshore profit-shifting in the future.
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blog November 14, 2017 Shopping for a Tax Haven: How Nike and Apple Accelerated Their Tax Avoidance Strategies, according to the Paradise Papers
A year and a half after the release of the Panama Papers, a new set of data leaks, the Paradise Papersreleased by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) provides important new information on the tax dodging of wealthy individuals as well as multinational corporations.
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blog November 8, 2017 House Tax Plan Would Make Offshore Tax Avoidance Substantially Worse
The Sunday release of the Paradise Papers has once again brought the issue of offshore tax avoidance to the forefront of public discussion. The papers expose the complex structures that companies such as Apple and Nike have pursued in recent years to pay little to nothing in taxes on their offshore earnings.
Yet even as these revelations make headlines, House Republicans are moving forward with major tax legislation, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, that would reward the worst tax avoiders and make it even easier for multinational companies to avoid taxes.
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report November 5, 2017 American Corporations Tell IRS that 61 Percent of Their Offshore Profits Are in 10 Tax Havens
Recent revelations that a Bermuda law firm helped facilitate offshore tax avoidance has heightened awareness of the vast amount of income and wealth flowing into tax and secrecy havens worldwide. The countries through which this firm helped funnel global elites’ assets also act as tax havens for multinational corporations. Recently released data from the Internal Revenue Service show that U.S. corporations claim that 61 percent of their foreign subsidiaries’ pretax worldwide income is being earned in 10 tiny tax haven countries.
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brief September 18, 2017 Fact Sheet: The Consequences of Adopting a Territorial Tax System
President Trump and Republican leaders in Congress have proposed a “territorial” tax system, which would allow American corporations to pay no U.S. taxes on most profits they book offshore. This would worsen the already substantial problem of corporate tax avoidance and result in more jobs and investment leaving the U.S. Lawmakers should know some key facts about the territorial approach.
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blog September 6, 2017 New ITEP Report: Trump’s Proposed Territorial Tax System Would Increase Corporate Tax Dodging
While promoting his ideas for overhauling our tax code today in North Dakota, President Trump said that Congress should adopt a territorial tax system which, he argued, would result in more investment in the United States. You’re not alone if you’re not sure what “territorial” means in this context. It’s a euphemism used by some politicians to describe a proposal that will be wildly unpopular once voters understand what it really means.
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report September 6, 2017 Turning Loopholes into Black Holes: Trump’s Territorial Tax Proposal Would Increase Corporate Tax Avoidance
The problem of offshore tax avoidance by American corporations could grow much worse under President Donald Trump’s proposal to adopt a “territorial” tax system, which would exempt the offshore profits of American corporations from U.S. taxes. This change would increase the already substantial benefits American corporations obtain when they use accounting gimmicks to make their profits appear to be earned in a foreign country that has no corporate income tax or has one that is extremely low or easy to avoid.
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blog May 4, 2017 Apple: A Case Study in Why a Tax Holiday for Offshore Cash is Indefensible
The Apple corporation made waves earlier this week with its disclosure that its worldwide cash now exceeds $250 billion. Less noticed was a separate disclosure on Wednesday that the company’s…