Financial Transparency Coalition

The corporate income tax is under attack. Nation states are scrambling to offer multinational corporations an ever growing feast of lower taxes, loopholes and incentives. Lobbyists and politicians constantly try to persuade us that the corporate tax is a bad, inefficient, unreasonable tax. Yet it is one of the most precious of all taxes. One of our ten points concerns revenue. Corporate income taxes have added up to almost US$ 7.5 trillion since the global financial crisis erupted in 2008, in OECD countries alone. This is nearly half of all OECD public health spending and around double the amount spent...

This week the Treasury Department began assembling administrative options for deterring or preventing U.S. companies from inverting—or reorganizing overseas to avoid paying federal taxes. This move follows on the heels of a strong statement from President Obama who accused inverting firms of "cherry-picking the rules.” As he put it: "My attitude is I don't care if it's legal, it's wrong.” Particularly common among pharmaceutical and life-sciences companies, inversions are primarily a means for U.S. companies to avoid corporate taxes. In an inversion, a smaller foreign company “acquires” a large U.S. firm, allowing the domestic firm to...

If you're anything like me, you may have spent an hour waiting in line at the U.S. post office yesterday. I realize I'm a blogger, and a graduate student, and in my twenties -- and all of these factors made me rather unlike the typical pen-and-paper-tax-filer -- but there's just something so satisfying about addressing an envelope (and sometimes a check) to the U.S. Department of the Treasury.

The budget conference committee, which is currently charged with negotiating a compromise on the U.S. federal budget, has met publicly for a second time last week. The committee must deliver a report to Congress by December 15 and, to avert another shutdown, Congress must extend government funding by January 15. Leaders in the budget committee leaders have said they “won’t waste time debating the areas where they already know there’s no agreement, but will focus on where deals can be cut.” Some Senate Democrats believe those compromises could lie in tax expenditures—including by eliminating “egregious” loopholes that wealthy individuals and...