Excerpt
The impetus to change this area of tax law has taken on increased significance in the weeks and months since the election. A GAO report from December revealed that 83 of the 100 largest publicly traded U.S. corporations had placed subsidiaries in tax haven jurisdictions to, ostensibly, pay less on their tax bills. This included a number of firms that had received billions of dollars in bailout funds from the federal government, such as Morgan Stanley (158 subsidiaries in the Cayman Islands and recipient of $10 billion in TARP money), Citigroup (90 subsidiaries and $45 billion in TARP funds), and Bank of America (59 subsidiaries and $45 billion).
"This is a notorious practice. Nobody is there. It is a P.O. box, a way to hide taxable revenue. We have a deficit of $1.2 trillion. Shouldn't we try to reduce that tax gap?" Rep. Rosa DeLauro, one of the lawmakers leading the anti-loophole charge, told the Huffington Post. "The other thing is, it puts companies and corporations who are paying their fair share of taxes at a disadvantage. Many of these corporations...dealt with greed and they took as much as they could, and they got away with it. Now they have brought our financial system to its knees, the federal government is bailing them out, while they are collectively contributing to an average annual revenue loss of $100 billion a year and we are asking tax payers to cover the bailout."
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