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On Saturday, the organization U.S. Uncut demonstrated at Apple Stores in several cities in protest against the company’s lobbying for an amnesty for offshore tax dodging by corporations, also known as a “repatriation holiday.”
This video shows what happened in the Apple Store in Washington, DC. U.S. Uncut has more information about the protests that took place in Boston, San Francisco, Chicago and other cities.
U.S. corporations, in theory, pay U.S. corporate income taxes on all of their profits, regardless of where they are earned. But they are allowed to “defer” (to indefinitely delay) those U.S. taxes on foreign profits until those profits are “repatriated” (brought back to the U.S.).
Some corporate leaders have called for a permanent exemption of U.S. taxes on offshore profits (a “territorial” tax system) while others have called for a temporary exemption, which is essentially what the “repatriation holiday” is.
As CTJ has explained before, the “repatriation holiday” is an amnesty for corporate tax dodgers rather than a break for companies doing real business abroad.
Multinational corporations that are conducting real business offshore and paying taxes to a foreign government have much less to gain from a repatriation holiday. Their offshore profits are tied up in offshore investments, making it much less likely that they would bring those profits home in response to a tax holiday. And when they do bring those profits back to the U.S., they can do so under current law without paying the full 35 percent tax rate, because they are likely paying taxes to the government of the foreign country in which they are operating. (The U.S. taxes are reduced for each dollar paid to the foreign government to avoid double-taxation.)
On the other hand, a U.S. corporation that shifts its profits to a post office box in the Cayman Islands or another tax haven is likely to benefit enormously from a repatriation holiday. These profits may not be taxed at all by the foreign government, meaning they would be subject to the full 35 percent rate under current law.
So it’s entirely fair for U.S. Uncut and others to be outraged that Apple and other companies are lobbying for a repatriation holiday and claiming that it will help the U.S. economy. Congress tried this in 2004 and it failed to lead to any job creation. In fact, many companies that benefited actually reduced their U.S. workforce.
Congress’s official revenue estimators recently concluded that a repeat of the repatriation holiday would cost $79 billion over ten years. That’s partly because U.S. corporations are likely to respond to a second repatriation holiday by shifting even more of their profits to offshore tax havens since they will have concluded that Congress is willing to call off almost all U.S. taxes on those profits every few years.