The Biggest Tax Scam Ever
In July, the American pharmaceutical giant AbbVie, maker of the world’s top-selling drug – the arthritis treatment Humira – reached a blockbuster deal to acquire European rival Shire, best known for the attention-deficit medication Adderall. The merger was cheered by Wall Street, not for what the deal will do to advance pharmaceutical science, but because it will empower the bigger firm, AbbVie, to renounce its U.S. citizenship.
At $55 billion, the AbbVie deal is the largest in a cavalcade of corporate “inversions.” A loophole in American tax law permits companies with just 20 percent foreign ownership to reincorporate abroad, which means that if a big U.S. firm acquires a smaller company located in a tax haven, it can then “invert” – that is, become a subsidiary of its foreign-based affiliate – and kiss a huge share of its IRS obligations goodbye.
AbbVie shareholders will continue to control 75 percent of the company, which will still be managed by executives outside Chicago. But the merged company will now file its tax returns on the island of Jersey – a speck of land in the English Channel, where Shire is incorporated. AbbVie, which racked up more than $10 billion in Humira sales last year, will slash its effective corporate tax rate from 22 percent to 13. The cost to the U.S. Treasury? Possibly as much as $1.3 billion by the year 2020.
Companies striking deals to become technically foreign can be found in all corners of American business, from California computer-equipment manufacturer Applied Materials to Minnesota medical-device giant Medtronic to North Carolinabased banana behemoth Chiquita. Little is changing in the core business of these firms. They will just pay less in taxes – and to a foreign government, often Ireland or the Netherlands.
These tax turncoats have drawn the ire of President Obama. “I don’t care if it’s legal,” he declared this summer. “It’s wrong.” These inverted companies, he said, “don’t want to give up . . . all the advantages of operating in the United States. They just don’t want to pay for it.”
With Congress gridlocked, Obama is vowing to tackle the problem on his own – as he has done to advance his agenda on LGBT equality and immigration reform. In August, he threatened “quick” executive action to “at least discourage” inversion schemes. But pressed for specifics, the president conceded the White House has no silver bullet. In fact, Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew had declared only weeks earlier, “We do not believe we have the authority to address this inversion question through administrative action. If we did, we would be doing more.”
Over the next decade, corporate inversions could cost the U.S. Treasury nearly $20 billion – revenues that could otherwise pay for Head Start programs, to rebuild roads and bridges, or just bring down the deficit. The wave of inversions is threatening “to hollow out the U.S. corporate income tax base,” Lew warned in a July letter to the chief tax writers in the House and Senate. But inversions are just the tip of the iceberg. The crisis of corporate tax avoidance is far more pervasive – and destructive – than either Obama or Lew is letting on. At a moment when Congress appears impossibly divided, a strong, bipartisan consensus has, in fact, emerged in Washington: The world’s richest corporations will get away with fleecing hundreds of billions of tax dollars from the rest of us.
In public, Democratic politicians blast corporate tax dodgers. But the party’s most viable comprehensive “reform” proposals would reward the crooked accounting of U.S.-based multinationals. Republicanbacked legislation – no surprise – would only make the crisis worse. Why? “It’s not rocket science; it’s money and politics,” says Jared Bernstein, former top economic adviser to Vice President Joe Biden. “Concentrated wealth is buying the policy agenda it likes, and blocking one it doesn’t.”
Last year the IRS finally collected more in tax receipts than it did before the crash in 2007. But dig a little deeper into the numbers and it is clear we haven’t returned to normal: Corporations paid nearly $100 billion less in federal income taxes last year than before the Great Recession – down nearly 40 percent as a share of GDP. In fact, corporate profits and corporate tax collections are now trending in opposite directions. Profits were up $93 billion last year – to a high of $2.1 trillion, according to the Commerce Department. Yet corporate tax payments actually fell last year by more than $15 billion.
How is this possible?
It goes way beyond inversion. The top names in American business – from Apple to Xerox – have joined in the greatest tax dodge in world history. Using clever accounting games, these corporations have siphoned majestic sums out of the country and into tax-haven shell companies – where the money is untouchable by the IRS.
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