Author: tarek

The nation has a number of pressing problems, and our polarized Congress all too often can’t seem to compromise on policies that would address fundamental issues that most of us care about. In this context, it seems a pending proposal by Democratic Senator Majority Leader Harry Reid and Sen. Rand Paul, a Republican senator and libertarian stalwart, would be a refreshing change from the norm. But not so much.

Unfortunately, Sens. Reid and Paul have proposed to “fund” the Highway Trust Fund with a nonsensical measure that would reward corporate tax avoidance and raise almost no revenue, according to their own description of the plan.

Policymakers know our nation’s roads are chronically underfunded. Since 2008, Congress has covered $53 billion of transportation funding shortfalls by taking needed tax dollars out of general fund revenue, and official forecasts show the need for a huge infusion of new cash to maintain our roads and bridges. There is a straightforward policy solution—increasing the federal gas tax to offset large inflationary declines over the past two decades—that requires a legislative champion.

Instead of taking the obvious step of fixing the federal gas tax, Reid and Paul propose a repatriation tax holiday, which would give multinational corporations an extremely low tax rate on offshore profits they repatriate (profits they officially bring back to the United States). The idea is that corporations would bring to the United States offshore profits they otherwise would leave abroad, and the federal government could tax those profits (albeit at an extremely low rate) and put the revenue toward the transportation fund.

The first problem with such a proposal is many of these offshore profits are clearly earned in the United States and then manipulated through accounting gimmicks so corporations appear to earn the money in countries where it won’t be taxed, as demonstrated by several recent CTJ reports. In fact, profits corporations report earning in zero-tax countries would receive the biggest breaks under a repatriation holiday because the U.S. tax normally due on repatriated profits is reduced by whatever taxes have been paid to foreign governments.

The second problem with a repatriation holiday is that Congress enacted this type of proposal in 2004, and critics have widely panned that measure as providing no increase in employment or investment but only enriching shareholders and executives.

The third problem is that it loses revenue. The non-partisan Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) has estimated that a repeat of the 2004 measure would reduce revenue by (and increase the budget deficit by) $96 billion over a decade.

According to JCT, one reason for the massive revenue loss is that some of the offshore profits would be repatriated anyway absent any new tax break, and companies would pay the full tax. Another reason is that the measure would encourage corporations to engage in even more accounting games to make their U.S. profits appear to be earned in offshore tax havens, with the expectation that a little lobbying could prod Congress to enact another repatriation holiday in a few years.

Reid and Paul have added a detail that they claim improves their proposal. They argue that companies would rather borrow money than tap profits they claim to hold “offshore.” Reid and Paul therefore propose to also limit the tax-deductibility of corporate borrowing by asserting that any business borrowing that is done for the purpose of avoiding repatriating offshore cash would be non-deductible.

It is unclear how this could possibly be implemented, but even if it works, the New York Times reports that Reid’s staff believes the net effect would raise just $3 billion over a decade. This is laughably insufficient. Replenishing the Highway Trust Fund just to maintain spending until the end of 2015 will cost $18 billion. 

News we cannot make up from our friends at the NC Budget and Tax Center: The North Carolina Senate wants to take a sacred public trust, the education of our children, and subject it to the whims of a voluntary funding system. After frittering away precious resources for schools by giving millionaires – among the only people who have prospered much in recent years – an income tax cut they didn’t need, the Senate now wants North Carolinians to voluntarily give back part or all of their income tax refunds so teachers can get a pay raise. A better, saner solution would be for the Senate to acknowledge reality: the tax plan that it and the House passed last year and the governor signed into law is failing the people of North Carolina – and their kids. Read more about this ridiculous plan here.

Kansas lawmakers should be prepared to see lots of red ink within the next year. Former state budget director Duane Goossen has said the state simply won’t have enough money to pay its bills. One reason Kansas is going down this path is because the state no longer taxes pass-through business income, and the price tag of the deduction is largely unknown.  Perhaps this is the evidence Kansans need to prove that Governor Brownback’s experiment has failed.

Tax Fairness advocates take heart! Kudos to Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon for coming out against a sales tax hike for transportation. The governor said, “The burden of this … sales tax increase would fall disproportionately on Missouri’s working families and seniors.” The need for increased transportation funding is real, but it makes little sense to hike the sales tax almost immediately after cutting income taxes.

Perhaps South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley hasn’t closely watched the income tax elimination debate that has sputtered to a halt in other states. If she were paying attention she would see that each of these proposals has gone  nowhere, yet she is proposing that very same thing in the Palmetto State.

Illinois lawmakers are putting the state’s bond rating and already shaky fiscal house in further disorder by failing to address the state’s temporary 5 percent tax rate, which is set to fall to 3.75 percent in 2015.

State lawmakers vigorously debated two tax proposal this legislative session to resolve the issue.The first would have allowed a ballot question in November to amend the state constitution and allow a graduated income tax, and the second would have made the 5 percent income tax rate permanent.  Illinois lawmakers adjourned without going down either path but instead agreed to a fiscal year 2015 budget that is widely viewed as “kicking the can down the road.”

Voices for Illinois Children analyzed the budget and created an infographic that shows why lawmakers’ decision will be detrimental to the state: It ignores that the 5 percent income tax is temporary, relies on borrowing from other funds, and under funds state obligations. Many speculate election year politics got in the way, with lawmakers not wanting to cast tough votes in favor of maintaining current tax rates ahead of November.

Meanwhile, in Ohio …

Lawmakers okayed a $400 million tax cut package that we told you about last week. The package includes accelerating already scheduled income tax rate reductions and increasing an existing tax break for “pass through” businesses, while providing much smaller tax breaks to low- and middle-income families. The legislation now goes to Gov. Kasich, who is expected to sign the bill into law. For more on this legislation see Policy Matters Ohio report here.

Recently the Wisconsin State Journal ran an important piece describing the current tax debate in the Badger State. Gov. Walker has said he is interested in income tax repeal and already pushed through three major tax cuts during his term in office.  

Governor Walker’s major challenger, Mary Burke  has said, “My pledge is not to raise taxes overall and to make sure that Wisconsin taxes and fees are in line with other states.”

Clearly tax issues will be a hotly debated issue over the course of the gubernatorial campaign. At the request of the Wisconsin State Journal the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy provided data that powers a new interactive tax calculator that allows readers to answer the question “What’s the right tax  mix for Wisconsin?”

Yesterday, the conservative Tax Foundation wrote a misleading response to the report, “Offshore Shell Games,” by U.S. Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) Education Fund and Citizens for Tax Justice (CTJ).

Major Conclusions Not Challenged by the Tax Foundation

The Tax Foundation does not challenge most of the report’s findings because a strong body of research by academics, journalists and other tax policy analysts reach the same conclusions.

USPIRG Ed Fund/CTJ conclude that American corporations in the aggregate are obviously engaging in tax avoidance when they report to the IRS that their subsidiaries earn $94 billion in profits in Bermuda during a year when that country has a GDP (total economic output) of just $6 billion. We conclude that American corporations are engaging in obvious tax avoidance when they report to the IRS that they earn $51 billion in the Cayman Islands when that country has a GDP of just $3 billion. The Tax Foundation does not challenge this.

We also conclude that when Apple discloses it would pay a U.S. tax rate of about 33 percent on its offshore profits if it officially brings those profits to the United States, that means Apple has only paid a 2 percent effective tax rate to countries where it claims to have earned those profits. We conclude that when U.S. Steel discloses that it would pay a U.S. tax rate of about 34 percent on its offshore profits if it officially brings them to the U.S., that means U.S. Steel has only paid a 1 percent effective tax rate to the countries where it claims to have earned those profits. The findings are similar for Nike, Microsoft, Oracle, Safeway, American Express, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, Bank of America, and several other companies. This strongly suggests that most of these profits are reported to the IRS as earned in tax havens.

The Tax Foundation challenges none of this.

Tax Foundation’s Own Analysis Depends on Wildly Misleading Use of Data

The Tax Foundation claims that we ignore IRS data that “reports corporations actually paid a tax rate of about 27 percent on their reported foreign income” in 2010, as one of its own reports claims.

This is outrageously misleading. The Tax Foundation’s 27 percent figure is based on the offshore profits that American corporations “repatriate” to the U.S., which excludes profits that are reported as “earned” in tax havens or other countries with low tax rates. (Specifically, the Tax Foundation uses data reported on form 1118, which applies to offshore profits actually taxed by the U.S. in a given year.) The profits booked offshore for tax purposes that the U.S. PIRG Ed Fund/CTJ cite are those that companies have claimed are “permanently reinvested” offshore, meaning they have no plans to ever pay U.S. tax on them. By definition then, the Tax Foundation study does not factor in those profits at all.

As our report explains, when offshore corporate profits are “repatriated,” (officially brought to the U.S.) they are subject to U.S. corporate income tax minus a credit for any corporate income tax they paid to foreign governments. (This is the foreign tax credit.) As a result, American corporations are far, far more likely to repatriate offshore profits that have been subject to relatively high foreign tax rates, because they generate larger foreign tax credits. They are far less likely to repatriate offshore profits that they reported to earn in tax havens, because these profits would generate few if any foreign tax credits.

Tax Foundation’s Attempts to Pick Apart US PIRG Ed Fund/CTJ Analysis Do Not Withstand Scrutiny

The Tax Foundation attempts to pick apart pieces of the analysis in order to create a general sense that there is disagreement about the data and what the data can tell us. For example, we explain that only 55 companies disclose how much they would pay in U.S. taxes on their offshore profits if they officially brought those profits to the U.S. That’s how we determined that Apple, U.S. Steel, and those other companies officially hold most of their “offshore” profits in tax havens. The Tax Foundation claims that we are “cherry-picking” because most companies do not disclose this. We cannot possibly be “cherry-picking” if we provide the data for every Fortune 500 company that discloses such data. Further, there is no reason to believe (and none suggested by the Tax Foundation) that these 55 corporations are not representative of the rest of the Fortune 500 that have significant offshore profits.

In addition, the Tax Foundation challenges our use of IRS data to show how much of the officially “offshore” profits of American corporations are reported to be earned in tax havens, claiming that double-counting makes the data unreliable. The fact is that this data have been used in the same way in the report on tax havens by the non-partisan Congressional Research Service (CRS). Another report from CRS used data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), which is similar, and noted (on page 9) that any double-counting in the BEA data would not have a significant impact on the results.

For some unknown reason, the Tax Foundation also challenges our definition of the countries that are tax havens. As discussed in the text of the report, the definition of tax haven is based on the list of countries created by the non-partisan General Accountability Office’s (GAO) review of research done by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), and a U.S. District Court.

Rather than disputing the robust research done by various independent authorities that classify these countries as tax havens, the Tax Foundation makes the baseless claim that our list includes countries that have “international recognized normal tax systems.” In reality, each of the countries they define as normal has a well-known history of facilitating tax avoidance. For example, the Tax Foundation lists the Netherlands and Ireland as having normal tax systems, despite the well publicized use of international tax avoidance techniques like the ‘Double Irish With a Dutch Sandwich’ that utilize subsidiaries in these countries.

The bottom line is that the Tax Foundation is probably close to right that American corporations pay about a 27 percent tax rate to foreign countries where they actually do business. Of course, that finding contradicts the Tax Foundation’s frequent false claim that U.S. companies pay lower taxes to real foreign governments than they pay to the United States on their U.S. profits.

But the profits that American corporations book in offshore tax havens for tax purposes are mostly U.S. profits that these companies have artificially shifted offshore to avoid paying U.S. taxes. Such profit shifting is one reason why American corporations pay only a little over half the 35 percent corporate tax rate on the profits they actually earn in the United States.

New IRS Report Demonstrates Yet Another Reason Income Inequality Persists

If we reported that the rich continue to find ways to avoid paying taxes, the statement would elicit no more than a passing yawn, as by now this fact is common knowledge. But a new report released earlier this week by the IRS reveals why the nation shouldn’t continue to accept wealthy tax dodging as inevitable.

The IRS report confirms that the best-off taxpayers (those with incomes of $200,000 or more) continue to find legal ways to make their federal tax obligation $0. Worse, the report finds that this is occurring at a pace not seen for decades.

From the report’s first publication in 1977 through 2000, the number of high-income Americans paying no tax never exceeded 3,000. But the past four years have seen an explosion of high-end tax avoidance: in each of these years, the number of zero-tax Americans found in this report has exceeded 30,000.

In 2011 (the latest year for which data are available), almost 33,000 people with incomes over $200,000 paid no federal income tax. For this group—less than one percent of all Americans with incomes over $200,000 in 2011—tax-exempt bond interest and itemized deductions are among the main tax breaks that make this tax-avoiding feat possible. 

In 1977, Congress mandated the IRS publish this report annually to help policymakers understand whether high-income tax avoidance was an ongoing problem, and (presumably) to help build the case for reform. This latest report paints a clear picture of a growing problem.

The good news is that tax reforms included in President Barack Obama’s budget plan for the upcoming fiscal year would pare back tax breaks for itemized deductions and bond interest, making important strides toward restoring these high-income Americans to the tax rolls.

Whether it’s gigantic Fortune 500 corporations or super-rich individuals, tax avoidance has a corrosive effect on the public’s confidence in our tax system, not to mention it perpetuates worsening income inequality. Ensuring the best-off Americans have some “skin in the game” should be a basic priority of tax reform.

Representatives of Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries are meeting in Washington this week to determine what reforms they should recommend to address offshore corporate tax avoidance. Such recommendations would implement the Action Plan on Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS), which OECD issued last summer. The plan doesn’t go far enough, but the Obama administration has recently indicated that it is restraining OECD talks from resulting in more fundamental reforms, and the top Republican tax writers in Congress issued a statement on June 2 that seems even more opposed to reform.

As we wrote about the Action Plan last summer,

While the plan does offer strategies that will block some of the corporate tax avoidance that is sapping governments of funds they need to make public investments, the plan fails to call for fundamental change that would result in a simplified, workable international tax system.

Most importantly, the OECD does not call on governments to fundamentally abandon the tax systems that have caused these problems — the “deferral” system in the U.S. and the “territorial” system that many other countries have — but only suggests modest changes. Both tax systems require tax enforcement authorities to accept the pretense that a web of “subsidiary corporations” in different countries are truly different companies, even when they are all completely controlled by a CEO in, say New York or Connecticut or London. This leaves tax enforcement authorities with the impossible task of divining which profits are “earned” by a subsidiary company that is nothing more than a post office box in Bermuda, and which profits are earned by the American or European corporation that controls that Bermuda subsidiary.

In April, we noted that the Obama administration seems to be blocking any more fundamental (more effective) reform and is clinging to the “arms length” principle that supposedly prevents subsidiaries owned by a single U.S. corporation from over-charging and under-charging each other for transactions in ways that make profits disappear from one country and magically reappear in another. As we explained,

But when a company like Apple or Microsoft transfers a patent for a completely new invention to one of its offshore subsidiaries, how can the IRS even know what the market value of that patent would be? And tech companies are not the only problem. The IRS apparently found the arm’s length standard unenforceable against Caterpillar when that company transferred the rights to 85 percent of its profits from selling spare parts to a Swiss subsidiary that had almost nothing to do with the actual business.

This week, just to kill any lingering possibility that the OECD will do some good, Rep. Dave Camp and Senator Orrin Hatch, the Republican chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee and the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, issued a statement claiming they are “concerned that the BEPS project is now being used as a way for other countries to simply increase taxes on American taxpayers [corporations].”

Of course, major multinational corporations from every country will, in fact, experience a tax increase if the OECD effort is even remotely successful. American corporations are using complex accounting gimmicks to artificially shift profits out of the U.S. and out of other countries into tax havens, countries where they will be taxed very little or not at all. There is no question this is happening. As CTJ recently found, American corporations reported to the IRS in 2010 that their subsidiaries had earned $94 billion in Bermuda, which is obviously impossible because that country had a GDP (output of all goods and services) of just $6 billion that year.

In their statement, Camp and Hatch complain that “When foreign governments – either unilaterally or under the guise of a multilateral framework – abandon long-standing principles that determine taxing jurisdiction in a quest for more revenue, Americans are threatened with an un-level playing field.”

But what exactly have these long-standing principles, like the “arm’s length” standard accomplished? They’ve allowed American corporations to tell the IRS that in 2010 their subsidiaries in the Cayman Islands had profits of $51 billion even though that country had a GDP of just $3 billion. They’ve allowed American corporations to tell the IRS that in 2010 their subsidiaries in the British Virgin Islands had profits of $10 billion even thought that country had a GDP of just $1 billion.

Camp and Hatch have claimed in the past that the solution for our corporate income tax is to essentially adopt a “territorial” tax system that would actually increase the rewards for American corporations that manage to make their U.S. profits appear to be earned in Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, the British Virgin Islands, or any other tax haven. Congress needs to move in the opposite direction, as we have explained in detail. 

There is a bit of an uproar in Washington D.C. over a City Council proposal to begin requiring consumers to pay sales tax on yoga classes, gym members and similar activities.

Fitness centers, yoga studios and their allies have started a clever campaign decrying the proposed “fitness tax,” or “yoga tax”, arguing that “D.C. residents should [not] be monetarily penalized for being healthy.” Another anti-tax petition complains that “[f]itness activities are already really expensive.”

Here’s why their views are grossly misguided:

The real question is whether yoga and other fitness activities should be given a special tax-free status that is unavailable to most other items purchased by consumers. The proposal also would tax car washes, bowling alleys and billiard parlors. These new sales taxes are part of a broader package of reforms that actually cut taxes for residents while broadening the sales tax base to raise more revenue. Exempting fitness centers from sales taxes shifts the cost of funding public services onto every other small business in Washington D.C., making every other item city residents purchase more expensive in the long run.

The tax reform process began a few months ago after the Washington D.C. Tax Revision Commission recommended a host of changes to virtually all major taxes levied by the city. The D.C. City Council quietly approved many of these changes last week.

The process is not quite complete—the Council will take a second vote on the plan before sending it to Major Vincent Gray for his signature—but most observers think the plan will ultimately be ratified.

The bill will cut city taxes by at least $165 million a year, through a combination of cuts in personal and business income taxes and estate taxes—and the aforementioned expansion of the sales tax base.

The income tax changes include components designed to benefit low- and middle-income families, including expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit and personal exemptions, and reducing the tax rate paid by upper-income families earning less than $1 million.

Of course it is the proposed sales tax changes that are making the most waves. But, as the DC Fiscal Policy Institute’s Ed Lazere notes, the proposed base expansion is a sensible step toward a fairer and more sustainable sales tax: there’s no sound rationale for carving out special tax exemptions for tanning salons, bowling alleys, car washes and health clubs while requiring every other retailer to collect sales taxes.

Wherever you live, the sales tax rate is almost certainly higher than it was 20 years ago, and that’s largely because lawmakers have been forced to hike the rate to make up for the inexorable long-term decline in sales tax yields caused by most states’ unwillingness to tax services. If D.C. lawmakers ultimately approve the proposed base expansions, they will face less long-term pressure to jack up the sales tax rate on everything else to which the tax currently applies.

New IRS regulations issued on June 2 expand the ability of companies to claim the research credit retroactively for prior tax years on amended tax returns. This makes it far more likely that the credit will subsidize activities that businesses would have carried out anyway, even in the absence of any tax incentive.

The research credit is supposedly designed to encourage companies to expand the amount of research they conduct. That means it can be thought of as effective only to the extent that it subsidizes research that businesses would not have carried out anyway even if no tax break was offered to them. Of course, if a company carried out research and did not even become aware that it could claim the credit until three years later, there is no way that research was the result of the credit.

In our December 2013 report, “Reform the Research Tax Credit — Or Let It Die,” Citizens for Tax Justice called upon Congress to bar companies from claiming the credit on amended returns. There are two main versions of the research credit available, the regular research credit and the “alternative simplified credit” (ASC). Companies were already allowed to claim the regular credit on amended returns — which CTJ sought to ban. But IRS regulations had barred companies from claiming the ASC on amended returns — until now.

As the CTJ report explained, at least two senators explicitly called for allowing companies to claim the ACS on amended returns, giving absolutely no policy rationale for such a change. It appears likely that the pressure to make this change came from accounting firms like Alliantgroup who approach businesses and offer to help them claim the research credit for activities they carried out in the past.

Continuing a welcome trend, lawmakers in a number of states are showing interest in dealing with chronic transportation shortfalls. New Hampshire Gov. Maggie Hassan signed a 4-cent gas tax increase into law, South Dakota Governor Dennis Daugaard announced that he is now open to a gas tax increase, and a Michigan Senate committee passed a bill that would increase and reform their state’s gas tax.

Gov. Christie’s administration recently announced two plans for addressing New Jersey’s $875-million budget gap in the current fiscal year as well as next year’s projected shortfall. Rather than increasing income taxes on millionaires, as some Democrats proposed, Christie said he will reduce the amount of two state pension payments scheduled for June of the current year and 2015. The administration will also push back $400 million of property tax relief due this August until May of 2015. The legally questionable pension payment plan faces a potential lawsuit from state labor unions.

The New York Times recently reported that Madison Square Garden (MSG) has enjoyed an indefinite property tax exemption for the past 32 years, a generous arrangement no other property in the city is afforded. The deal with New York City made in 1982,  which then-Mayor Edward Koch thought would last only 10 years, is set to save the MSG’s owners about $54 million in the next fiscal year.

On Wednesday, the North Carolina state Senate voted to give preliminary approval to a bill that prohibits municipalities from collecting privilege taxes from businesses. Signed by Gov. Pat McCrory on Friday, the legislation is set to cost local governments $62 million in fiscal year 2016 if leaders don’t find a revenue replacement. Large cities like Raleigh, which may lose $8 million as a result of the bill, would be particularly hard-hit and may have to resort to raising property taxes.