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Treasury Toying with Making Tax Avoidance Easier

Sometimes the long drive towards a more equitable and reasonable tax system feels like it’s one step forward, two steps back.

This month, the two steps back we risk taking come in the form of unraveling a Treasury rule established under the Obama administration. Thanks to an executive order from the Trump administration, Section 385 is currently being reviewed by the Treasury Department. The rule takes aim at curbing corporate tax haven abuse — the hallmark of a tax system rigged for the few biggest multinational corporations. Preliminary estimates from Treasury found that it’s impact on offshore tax avoidance would be significant considering that the rule would raise $7.4 billion over 10 years.

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A Simple Step to Address a Far-Reaching Problem

Today, Senators Whitehouse, Grassley, and Feinstein and Representatives Maloney, King, Royce, Waters, and Moore introduced a bipartisan bill to end the use of anonymous shell companies.  If passed by Congress and signed by the President, the measure would disrupt the global system for money laundering used by corrupt public officials, terrorists, drug cartels, human trafficking operations, and others and provide leadership to the international move toward transparency.

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World Leaders Gathered for Another Paris Agreement, and the U.S. Was Noticeably Absent

Tell me if you’ve heard this before:  Nations from around the world gathered in Paris to sign a multilateral agreement that had been negotiated over several years with the U.S. as a leading partner.   In the end, the U.S. was conspicuously absent from the ceremony and did not sign onto the final agreement.

I, of course, am referring to an effort to combat aggressive corporate tax avoidance and address the wealth-draining concerns over the growth of tax havens. See FACT’s statement on the event.  The agreement was a part of the multilateral initiative on Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) negotiated through the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).  Over seventy countries moved forward with an agreement to combat tax avoidance by amending bilateral tax treaties.

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EU to Vote on Public Tax Disclosure

In a post Panama Papers world, secrecy seems to be losing its caché.   Public officials and the citizens they represent express increasing frustration with the hidden finances of powerful multinational companies and the ultra-wealthy.

In recent months, tax enforcement in the European Union (EU) has been stepped up with cases accusing tax haven countries of providing illegal state aid, aggressive tax avoidance strategies are being challenged and there is a promising push for greater financial transparency and accountability.

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Tax Avoiding Companies Well-Represented at Tax Reform Hearing

Today the House Ways and Means Committee will hold its first tax reform hearing of 2017, which marks the official opening of the tax reform debate in Congress. True tax reform, if the committee sought to achieve it, could create more jobs and ensure companies are paying their fair share by cracking down on the massive offshore tax avoidance that companies engage in. Unfortunately, the panel of witnesses for today’s hearing is largely made up of representatives of various major corporations that are beneficiaries of the loopholes in our current corporate tax laws. Given this, it seems likely that these panelists will not push for a fairer corporate tax code, but rather a code that allows them to avoid even more taxes and incentivizes moving more jobs offshore.

The biggest tax avoider represented at the hearing is AT&T, which received $38 billion in tax breaks over the past eight years, meaning that it received more tax breaks than any other Fortune 500 company during that time. Over the past 10 years, the company managed to pay an average federal income tax rate of just 11.3 percent, less than a third of the statutory rate of 35 percent. In 2011, it managed to pay nothing in federal income taxes, despite earning $12 billion in profits.

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First Gambit in Tax Reform Debate a Threat to Taxpayers

A Recent Executive Order Threatens to Roll Back Safeguards against Offshore Tax Avoidance
The tax reform battle in Congress is looking to be a long, hard-fought one, but the president’s recent executive order shows that there may be no need to wait to start giving huge tax breaks to corporate giants.

The executive order, signed late last month, calls on the Treasury Department to review all “significant” tax regulations issued on or after January 1, 2016. Included in this window are rules curtailing earnings stripping and corporate inversions for the purpose of tax avoidance.

 

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