It’s a classic case of tax evasion, and yet, it’s been done with little or no discussion.
What we’ve got here is a big multinational company using a loophole in our tax code that lets it avoid paying a dime in taxes on what it calls “income earned” on behalf of its subsidiaries.
This isn’t a loophole, but a loophole designed to allow it to avoid paying taxes on the income it’s “earning.”
It’s called the “equity inversion,” and it’s used by a wide range of multinationals.
In a nutshell, the company uses an investment company to hide its income and then creates a new entity to keep its income under the radar.
The new entity pays income taxes on all its profits as if they were earned, thus avoiding paying any federal income taxes at all.
So, when a corporation’s profits go up, it can pass them off as income earned by its own subsidiaries, making it look like a legitimate company, with all the benefits of a corporation.
But as a result of the tax loophole, corporations like the ones we just heard of are able to pay billions of dollars in taxes that they wouldn’t otherwise pay.
So when you add up all the taxes they pay and all the money they earn through “investment,” it’s a total tax burden on American workers.
The bottom line: it’s all tax evasion.
We know this from a new study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
The Center has been tracking corporate tax evasion since the late 1990s.
And their new report, released this week, is the latest to demonstrate how these corporations are getting away with it.
In it, they show how multinationals are able a new loophole that lets them avoid paying billions of taxes by simply shifting the income of their subsidiaries from their own country to a new country in the world.
What’s really surprising about this study is how little discussion has been given to the loophole, which the Center found “could potentially be used to avoid at least $20 billion in U.S. taxes over a decade, the equivalent of more than $2.5 trillion in total corporate taxes.”
The Center’s analysis also found that in 2017, “corporations used this tax-avoidance strategy to avoid nearly $13.5 billion in taxes, an average of nearly 3.5 percent of their total U.N. income, including nearly $2 billion in the United States.”
They estimate that by 2018, “the number of companies that can shift income to a tax haven outside the United Nations could exceed $1 trillion.”
So, why isn’t there more discussion?
Well, the reason is that the loophole is not being properly used.
It’s being abused to the benefit of the wealthy.
The problem is, corporations are paying less tax than they have been for decades.
The tax code doesn’t take into account the fact that corporations are often multinational corporations.
They’re also often structured in a way that encourages them to pay relatively little tax.
So even though we’re paying about 10 percent of what they’re paying, corporations have been paying a little bit more in taxes than they used to.
The fact is, as the Center’s report found, “a tax break for the wealthiest 1 percent of U.D. residents is a tax break to the richest 1 percent in other countries.”
The problem with this is that it’s not just about the money.
It also takes into account how the loopholes are being abused.
In the case of the Equity invertions, companies are using loopholes to get around paying taxes.
In order to avoid taxes, companies have to have subsidiaries in a foreign country, such as Ireland, Luxembourg, or even a tax-free zone.
So it’s possible for the companies to avoid the full cost of paying taxes by creating multiple “operating subsidiaries” in those countries, which are essentially tax havens for the profits they pay.
And these companies can then transfer the profits of these subsidiaries to a subsidiary in another country to avoid having to pay taxes on them.
This is called the corporate inversion.
But when companies do this, they are using a tax loophole.
The Tax Foundation explains, “Corporations can use the tax code to shelter their profits, while still paying taxes, by using multiple companies in different tax jurisdictions.
This strategy allows the profits to be effectively transferred from a tax jurisdiction to a lower tax jurisdiction.
Theoretically, this avoids paying federal income tax.”
It sounds simple, right?
So why is it that this is happening?
Well for one, there’s a lot of money at stake.
When we hear about the big tax cheats, it seems like it’s just a big tax scam, but the reality is, these corporations aren’t paying a single penny in taxes.
And in fact, it could be costing taxpayers billions of tax dollars.
Taxpayers who have been struggling to pay their taxes for years are going to be
