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Close Tax Loopholes

There is widespread agreement, across the political spectrum, that the gaming of the tax code by multinational corporations is a problem. When profits and jobs are shipped offshore, we not only harm the U.S. economy, we fuel a tax haven industry that drains wealth around the world. We seek to fix the problem of large, well-connected interests gaming the tax system.

Senate Bill Would Plug Key Offshore Loophole and Reduce Incentives for Outsourcing in Tax Overhaul

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Senate lawmakers introduced legislation Thursday that would make it harder for multinational corporations to game the offshore provisions in the newly adopted tax overhaul.  Sponsored by Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), the Removing Incentives for Outsourcing Act (S.3674) would ensure that tax rates for profits booked offshore are applied on a per-country basis, rather than on a worldwide average basis — reducing the chance of gaming.

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The Paradise Papers: A Year Later

This week marks the one-year anniversary of the release of The Paradise Papers, a leak that included 13 million documents from a large offshore law firm.  The leak detailed a number of tax avoidance techniques used by the wealthy and multinational corporations to avoid taxes.  At the same time, Congress was rushing to pass the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

In light of the Paradise Papers revelations, we encouraged lawmakers to carefully review the information from the leak and consider whether their overhaul would address the tax dodging practices exposed.  They chose not to do so.

Unlike the earlier Panama Papers story, where Americans were notably absent, the Paradise Papers had clear U.S. connections.  There was extensive data on the tax avoidance schemes of at least 31,000 U.S. citizens, residents, and companies including household names like Apple, Nike, and Uber.  Rather than consider lessons to be learned around how policies might work in practice, lawmakers chose to ignore the warning signs.  The tax law passed just over a month later with minimal attention paid to any of the insights to be gleaned from the leak.  It should not be surprising that the law continues to encourage multinational corporations to engage in offshore tax schemes.

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‘Financial Exposure’ Showcases Tax Misconduct by Powerful Individuals and Corporations

The story of tireless congressional staff uncovering brazen misdeeds by powerful individuals and corporations in Elise J. Bean’s Financial Exposure has an anchoring quality in the context of rampant scandal that has come to characterize today’s politics. Bean’s account reiterates the point that tax avoidance and tax evasion were endemic to our financial system long before allegations against a sitting president brought them to the forefront of the public consciousness.

While the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI) is an investigative body rather than a policymaking one, the inquiries into abusive tax shelters, secretive banking practices, and corporate tax avoidance that Bean describes illustrate some of the central policy problems plaguing the American tax system.

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Revealing Big Pharma’s tax dodging: The story behind the numbers

Critics may argue the data we base our calculations on is incomplete, the methodology with which we calculate tax loss figures simplistic. And they are right.

Our tax loss estimates are rough because corporate secrecy limited our access to data. We analyzed information for only a small subset of the dozens of countries in which pharma corporations operate, and only a subset of their subsidiaries in those countries. The data we found is just the tip of the iceberg, especially for developing countries.

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