Report: US Loses $100B Yearly to Tax Havens

Brown enlists Obama to help crack down on offshore facilities

(NEWSER) - Ahead of the G20 financial summit in London this April, Gordon Brown is pushing ahead with a major diplomatic effort to crack down on international tax havens that cost governments $150 billion a year. The British PM has held talks with fellow world leaders, including Barack Obama, reports the Guardian. While Obama has taken an interest in the Cayman Islands, Brown is pressing Switzerland to close its many loopholes. More»

Powerful congressman sorry for screw-up

(NEWSER) - Rep. Charles Rangel blamed his failure to pay taxes on his rental income from a Caribbean villa to “cultural and language barriers,” reports the New York Times. “Every time I thought I was getting somewhere, they’d start speaking Spanish,” Rangel said of his attempts to sort out his paperwork. The congressman admitted responsibility for his errors and submitted materials for an ethics investigation. More»

$5B tax dodge crackdown

(NEWSER) - The fallout from Germany's enormous tax evasion scandal continued yesterday as police began a nationwide raid of the homes and offices of over a hundred people. More than 1,000 rich Germans are suspected of cheating the German treasury out of $5 billion by transferring huge sums to banks and dummy foundations in the tax haven of Liechtenstein. So far the biggest casualty of the affair has been the CEO of Deutsche Post, Europe's largest mail service and the owner of shipping company DHL. More»

'Ex-PATRIOT' Act to punish those who try to dodge taxes

(NEWSER) - Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin's decision to renounce his US citizenship—and, conveniently, a lot of the taxes from his expected IPO windfall—has struck a nerve on Capitol Hill. Chuck Schumer and Bob Casey will today announce a new bill called the "Ex-PATRIOT Act" (a typically dopey acronym meaning "Expatriation Prevention by Abolishing Tax-Related Incentives for Offshore Tenancy"), ABC reports. They said the bill is a direct response to Saverin's "scheme" to "duck up to $67 million in taxes." More»

Tech giant highlights government's tax problems in information age

(NEWSER) - Apple is one of the most profitable companies in the world—and also one of the most aggressive and creative at avoiding taxes, reports the New York Times , which outlines a number of the company's tax-avoidance strategies. Among them:

• Despite its well-known Cupertino, California, headquarters, Apple partly avoids the state's 8.84% corporate tax rate by directing some of its profits to a subsidiary in Nevada, where there are no corporate state taxes. (Almost poetically, that subsidiary is named Braeburn Capital, after a tart yet sweet type of apple.)
• Apple's sales teams in high-tax countries sell on behalf of subsidiaries in low-tax countries, avoiding income taxes.
• It employs a handful of employees in Luxembourg, where sales of items downloaded by customers in Europe and Africa are recorded—and taxed at a discounted rate.
• It created the “Double Irish With a Dutch Sandwich," a much-emulated tax-avoidance strategy of routing profits through the Netherlands to Ireland and then through the Caribbean.