Tax Evaders: Multinationals are Selling the Country ShortThe biggest tax scam on earth has a very innocent sounding name. It is called "transfer prices." That almost sounds boring. It is, however, anything but boring. Abuse of transfer prices is a key tool multinational corporations use to fool the U.S. and other jurisdictions to think that they have virtually no profit; hence, they shouldn't pay any taxes.
Corporations involved in this scam are "model corporate citizens," or so they would like us to believe. The truth is that they rob us all blind. The money we lose can be estimated in the tens of billions, or possibly hundreds of billions of dollars every year. We all end up paying higher taxes because rich corporations make sure they don't.
There is only one problem for U.S. companies with this strategy, and that is that if they repatriate this money to the U.S. they have to pay full corporate taxes. In fact, according to BusinessWeek, U.S. multinational corporations have built up profits of as much as $750 billion overseas, much of it in tax havens such as the Ireland, Bahamas, and Singapore to avoid the stiff 35 percent levy they'd face if they repatriated the funds back into the U.S. But of course, Congress, which is basically paid for by our multinational corporations, generously provided for a one-time provision in the corporate tax code, so that they could repatriate profits earned before 2003, and held in foreign subsidiaries, at an effective 5.25 percent tax rate.
In the end, multinational corporations live in a global world which allows them to pretty much send their money to corporate tax havens at will, and then repatriate this money almost tax free, with the help of the U.S. Congress.
Peter Rost, M.D., is a former Vice President of Pfizer. He became well known in 2004 when he emerged as the first drug company executive to speak out in favor of reimportation of drugs.
Rost did not include other important points, the U.S. Department of Defense protects the global assets of the multinational corporations and our Departments of State and Commerce use their influence to get concessions from other nations for those multinationals.
Those same multinational corporations fund both Democratic and Republican candidates so they have bipartisan support for bills favorable to multinational corporations.
Benito Mussolini said "Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of State and corporate power." The 21st century version is more powerful because multinational corporate power controls the world’s only super power.
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
