We retired Tax Justice Blog in April 2017. For new content on issues related to tax justice, go to www.justtaxesblog.org
In recent months, Google, Inc. has come under fire by Britain’s parliament for its alleged use of “immoral” offshore tax dodges as well as by French authorities (Google’s history of shifting income to offshore jurisdictions, aka tax havens, is well documented). But none of this criticism seems to have changed the minds of Google’s executives: the company’s 2012 annual financial reports were released last week, and in them, the company admits to having shifted $9.5 billion in profits overseas in just the past year.
To put this in context, a recent CTJ report identified all 290 of the Fortune 500 corporations that have admitted holding cash indefinitely overseas; this report ranked Google as having the 15th largest offshore cash hoard, with $24.8 billion of offshore cash in 2011. CTJ’s report also showed that the offshore cash holdings of big corporations are highly concentrated in the hands of just a few companies, and the biggest 20 among these 290 corporations represented a little over half of the $1.6 trillion in offshore income we documented. And while we can’t precisely predict the revenue loss this represents, we did calculate that it could be as much as $433 billion in unpaid taxes.
So this fierce debate over whether to offer US multinationals a “tax holiday” for bringing their overseas stash back to the US, or to give them a permanent exemption by adopting a “territorial” tax system, is largely about whether a small number of large companies, including Google, should be rewarded for shipping their cash to low-tax jurisdictions. Given that most of us pay taxes on the money we earn in this country, only seems reasonable that colossally profitable corporations should do the same.