| | Bookmark and Share

Citizens for Tax Justice has long argued that offshore tax avoidance by corporations will never be fully addressed until Congress reforms our laws to tax the domestic profits and the offshore profits of our corporations at the same time and at the same rate. Only then will corporations have no incentive to make their U.S. profits appear to be generated in tax havens like Bermuda and the Cayman Islands. But a new report from US PIRG explains that state governments can at least protect state corporate income taxes from the worst offshore abuses with reforms newly adopted by Montana and Oregon.

As PIRG explains, these two states

“simply treat profits that companies book to notorious tax havens as if it were domestic taxable income. This simple loophole closing uses information that multinational companies already report to states. The reform could be introduced anywhere, but is readily available to the 24 states and District of Columbia that have already modernized their tax codes by enacting “combined reporting,” which requires companies to report on how profits are distributed among jurisdictions so that they are taxed based on how much business activity they do in those places. All told, closing this tax haven loophole could save the remaining 22 states and District of Columbia over a billion dollars annually.”

Read the US PIRG report.