We retired Tax Justice Blog in April 2017. For new content on issues related to tax justice, go to www.justtaxesblog.org
A two-page report from Citizens for Tax Justice explains new evidence of offshore tax avoidance by corporations unearthed by the non-partisan Congress Research Service (CRS).
In a nutshell, CRS finds that U.S. corporations report a huge share of their profits as officially earned in small, low-tax countries where they have very little investment and workforce while reporting a much smaller percentage of their profits in larger, industrial countries where they actually have massive investments and workforces.
This essentially confirms that corporations are artificially inflating the share of their profits that they claim to earn tax havens where they don’t really do much real business. Remember that offshore tax avoidance by corporations often takes the form of convoluted transactions that allow U.S. corporations to claim that most of the profits from their business are earned in offshore subsidiaries in a tax haven like Bermuda, and that the offshore subsidiary my be nothing more than a post office box.
And Bermuda is a great example. CRS finds that the amount of profits that U.S. corporations report to earn in Bermuda is 1,000 percent of Bermuda’s GDP! That’s ten times Bermuda’s gross national product — ten times the tiny country’s actual economic output. This is obviously impossible and confirms that much of the profits that U.S. corporations claim are earned there represent no actual economic activity but rather represent profits shifted from the U.S. or from other countries to take advantage of that fact that Bermuda has no corporate income tax.
Sadly, most of the tax dodges practiced by U.S. corporations to shift their profits to tax havens are actually legal. CTJ’s report explains what type of tax reform is needed to address this.