Financial Transparency Coalition

"Real patriots pay their fair share of taxes. They don’t run out on the bill," write Scott Klinger and Holly Sklar. Some of our nation’s biggest corporations are planning a tax holiday and they want you to pick up the tab. Actually, you already pay for their routine tax avoidance through the use of tax havens in Bermuda, the Cayman Islands and elsewhere. These accounting acrobatics cost the U.S. Treasury $100 billion a year. Now they want Congress to pass a special tax holiday for money they “repatriate” back to the United States. There’s nothing patriotic about this repatriation being pushed by...

The Sunday Times did an expose of Google’s tax affairs Sunday. I’ll declare an interest: they asked me to help the investigation, and I did. The findings? Google has avoided £3 billion of tax worldwide over the last five years. It’s tax rate outside the USA is just 3%. In 2009, if Google had declared profits in proportion to sales in the UK in the ratio that the worldwide accounts showed (about 35% profit pre tax) then the expected UK tax bill would have been about £190 million.

Media Coverage Report Card: Trending Accountability Global Financial Integrity evaluates the Media’s current coverage of corporate tax dodging and tax havens Corporate tax shenanigans have been in the news a lot lately. Here’s a quick guide to the stories currently shaping the debate over US tax policy and raising the “injustice level” from “amusingly frustrated” to “Shut-Down Congress Red.”

The Wall Street Journal reports:

Billionaire Bill Gates on Thursday agitated for state governments to adopt “clear and honest” accounting of their budgets, saying states’ true finances are being obscured from voters and threaten America’s public-education system. Speaking at a meeting here of leading thinkers known as the TED conference, Mr. Gates said that state budgets need more scrutiny and should follow more-transparent accounting principles, such as those used by GoogleInc. and Microsoft Corp, which Mr. Gates co-founded.