Last week, the House Ways and Means Committee held a hearing on the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA). Proponents of the law used the occasion to tout its alleged economic benefits and argued that its temporary provisions should be made permanent. The title of the hearing was “Growing Our Economy and Creating Jobs,” but there is little evidence that the law does either of these things.
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.
The HBO television show Last Week Tonight with John Oliver has become known for its longer segments that examine important issues facing the country. In its latest segment on Sunday, the show took a deep dive into corporate taxes and how many companies manage to avoid paying their fair share. Between its hilarious interludes, the segment painted a striking portrait of problems in our corporate tax code and how the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) failed to address them. Here are some key points.
Our 2016 report, Anonymity Overdose, charted the connection between the opioid epidemic and the problem of anonymous shell companies.
As Congress ramps up funding for the national response to this crisis (though not at the levels some had hoped for), we wanted to provide an update on how the opioid trafficking operations are changing, and why ending anonymous shell companies is still an incredibly low-cost, bipartisan approach to help take on the opioid crisis.
Home ownership is a quintessential part of the American dream. Now, nearly a decade after the housing market crash this dream for many Americans is still just that: a dream. Housing costs are rising far faster than wages—burdening renters. Residential properties are becoming prohibitively expensive—forcing out residents who may have called them home for decades.
To add insult to injury, the loss of affordable housing has been spurred by the use of anonymous shell companies. Bad actors or rich speculators use these companies to bid up prices on properties and then use them as a “bank” rather than a home—all without identifying who they are or where the money came from to purchase the property.
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 tax law and move toward a system where U.S. corporations can’t reap tax benefits from shifting jobs and profits offshore.
One of the biggest problems with the United States tax code is that it encourages multinational corporations to artificially shift their profits offshore, or even shift real investments and jobs offshore, to avoid paying taxes. A real tax reform would have put an end to tax avoidance and the tax incentives for offshoring, but the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) made both of these problems worse.
