Positively Un-American Tax Dodges - Fortune [View all]

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Positively un-American tax dodges
Bigtime companies are moving their “headquarters” overseas to dodge billions in taxes … that means the rest of us pay their share.
by Allan Sloan - FortuneMagazine
JULY 7, 2014, 7:00 AM EDT



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Ah, July! What a great month for those of us who celebrate American exceptionalism. There’s the lead-up to the Fourth, countrywide Independence Day celebrations including my town’s local Revolutionary War reenactment and fireworks, the enjoyable days of high summer, and, for the fortunate, the prospect of some time at the beach.

Sorry, but this year, July isn’t going to work for me. That’s because of a new kind of American corporate exceptionalism: companies that have decided to desert our country to avoid paying taxes but expect to keep receiving the full array of benefits that being American confers, and that everyone else is paying for.

Yes, leaving the country–a process that tax techies call inversion–is perfectly legal. A company does this by reincorporating in a place like Ireland, where the corporate tax rate is 12.5%, compared with 35% in the U.S. Inversion also makes it easier to divert what would normally be U.S. earnings to foreign, lower-tax locales. But being legal isn’t the same as being right. If a few companies invert, it’s irritating but no big deal for our society. But mass inversion is a whole other thing, and that’s where we’re heading.

We’ve also got a second, related problem, which I call the “never-heres.” They include formerly private companies like Accenture, a consulting firm that was spun off from Arthur Andersen, and disc-drive maker Seagate, which began as a U.S. company, went private in a 2000 buyout and was moved to the Cayman Islands, went public in 2002, then moved to Ireland from the Caymans in 2010. Firms like these can duck lots of U.S. taxes without being accused of having deserted our country because technically they were never here. So far, by Fortune’s count, some 60 U.S. companies have chosen the never-here or the inversion route, and others are lining up to leave.

All of this threatens to undermine our tax base, with projected losses in the billions. It also threatens to undermine the American public’s already shrinking respect for big corporations...

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More: http://fortune.com/2014/07/07/taxes-offshore-dodge/