Financial Transparency Coalition

Corporate America, in part through the now-dissolved WIN America Campaign, has spent a good portion of the last few years lobbying for a tax holiday. They would like Congress to allow them to repatriate deferred tax dollars that are sitting offshore and pay a very low tax rate, instead of the 35% that they owe. U.S. companies are allowed to wait to pay taxes on "foreign" income until they bring the money back into the United States. I put the word foreign in quotes because we know that "foreign" income is often just the result of abusive transfer pricing,...

This entire blog post is devoted to three sentences that came out of Senator John McCain’s mouth on Tuesday. "A whole blog post for three sentences?" You might ask. Well, yes. Those sentences were just that shocking. But before I get down to exactly what Mr. McCain said here’s a little background. In 2004 Congress passed the Homeland Investment Act, which provided a one-time tax holiday for the U.S. multinationals to repatriate foreign earnings. Normally, when companies bring back profits that are earned abroad, they are taxed at the standard 35% corporate tax rate. The Act allowed those companies to...

The FACT Coalition released a document detailing their legislative asks yesterday. The document does a great job of detailing important ways to keep the financial system accountable, both in a domestic and international sense. The entire document can be downloaded below the 'read more' or at the 'PDF' link in the post title.

"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...