Letter to IRS on Proposed Guidance for Implementation of TCJA Provisions
The FACT Coalition sent a letter to the IRS on proposed rules for the implementation of TCJA provisions. The full letter can be read below or downloaded here.
‘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.
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.
Prescription for Poverty: Drug Companies as Tax Dodgers, Price Gougers, and Influence Peddlers
Pharmaceutical companies claim to bear their fair share of taxes, but their financial statements tell a different story.
New Study Confirms Offshore Earnings are Flowing into Stock Buybacks, Not Jobs and Investments
For years, corporations stockpiled profits offshore to avoid paying U.S. taxes, with the sum growing to $2.6 trillion by 2017. Corporate apologists suggested that this cache was necessary because the corporate tax rate was too high, and they asserted that if the United States lowered its tax rate, corporations would repatriate those profits, pay taxes, invest in workers and we’d all win.
In 2016, then candidate Trump claimed there is as much as $5 trillion overseas and a tax break on those earnings would cause “all of this money to come back into our country” and “turn America into a magnet for new jobs.”
Based on previous experience with a repatriation holiday in 2004, critics argued that another repatriation tax break would be a major windfall to corporations that would enrich shareholders and accomplish little else.
In the end, corporations and their allies got their way.
U.S. Should Not Favor Foreign over U.S. Profits: Tax Multinationals the Same as Wholly Domestic Companies
The new tax law, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), changed the tax system from one in which U.S. corporations paid taxes equally on all their profits to one in which they pay lower taxes on profits booked outside the United States. By lowering the tax rate on foreign profits, the tax code now encourages U.S. corporations to move U.S. jobs and profits offshore.