No Amnesty for Corporate Tax Dodgers!

Representing a remarkable defeat for corporate tax dodgers, a spokesman for the so-called “Win America Campaign” confirmed this week that it has “temporarily suspended” its lobbying for a tax repatriation amnesty. The coalition of mostly high-tech companies pushed for months for a tax amnesty for repatriated offshore corporate profits. The campaign once seemed unstoppable because so many huge corporations, and veteran lobbyists with ties to lawmakers, were behind it. 

What supporters call a tax “repatriation holiday,” or more accurately, a tax amnesty, allows US corporations a window during which they can bring back (repatriate) foreign profits to the US at a hugely discounted tax rate. The holiday’s proponents argue this would encourage multi-national corporations to bring offshore profits back to the US.

CTJ has often pointed out that the only real solution is to end the tax break that encourages U.S. corporations to shift their profits offshore in the first place — the rule allowing corporations to defer (delay indefinitely) U.S. taxes on foreign profits. Deferral encourages corporations to shift their profits to offshore tax havens, and a repatriation amnesty would only encourage more of the same abuse.

The Win America Campaign and its long list of deep pocketed corporate backers (including Apple and Cisco) spared no expense in pushing the repatriation amnesty, spending some $760,000 over the last year. This sum allowed the coalition to hire a breathtaking 160 lobbyists (including at least 60 former staffers for current members of Congress) to promote their favored policy in Washington.

So what prevented Win America from winning its tax amnesty? It was the steady march of objective economic studies put out by groups from across the political spectrum demonstrating how the holiday would send more jobs and profits offshore and result in huge revenue losses.

One of the toughest blows the repatriation amnesty took came from the well-respected Congressional Research Service’s (CRS) report showing what happened last time: the benefits from the repatriation holiday in 2004 went primarily to dividend payments for corporate shareholders rather than to job creation as promised. In fact, the CRS found that many of the biggest corporate beneficiaries of the 2004 holiday had since actually reduced their US workforce.

On top of this, the bipartisan and official scorekeeper in Congress, the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT), found that a new repatriation holiday would cost $80 billion, which is a lot of money for a policy that would not create any jobs. Advocates for the tax holiday responded with studies of their own claiming the measure would actually raise revenue, but Citizens for Tax Justice (CTJ) immediately debunked the bogus assumptions underlying these reports. 

On top of the solid research there was the incredible and rare consensus among policy think tanks across the political spectrum to oppose the measure. The groups opposing a repatriation holiday included CTJ, Tax Policy Center, Tax Foundation, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and Heritage Foundation, to name a few.

The suspension of lobbying for the repatriation amnesty is a victory for ordinary taxpayers. And while the Win America Campaign isn’t dead – one lobbyist promised that “if there was an opportunity to move it, the band would get back together and it would rev up again” – its setback validates our work here at CTJ on corporate tax avoidance in all its forms.