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J.D. Crowe, Alabama
The Mobile Register
Cagle
13 April 2010
Adam Zyglis
Buffalo, NY, The Buffalo News
Cagle
27 November 2008
tax USA
http://www.nytimes.com/business/yourtaxes/?WT.mc_
id=BU-D-I-NYT-MOD-MOD-M036-ROS-0308-PH&WT.mc_ev=click&mkt=BU-D-I-NYT-MOD-MOD-M036-ROS-0308-PH
taxman
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/revealed-taxman-is-16322bn-out-of-pocket-1754390.html
tax receipts
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/revealed-taxman-is-16322bn-out-of-pocket-1754390.html
tax laws
income tax
http://business.guardian.co.uk/budget2007/story/0,,2039849,00.html
http://business.guardian.co.uk/budget2007/story/0,,2039718,00.html
tax cut
http://business.guardian.co.uk/budget2007/story/0,,2039269,00.html
tax return USA
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/19/us/politics/19taxes.html
tax cut USA
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/23/opinion/23burman.html
tax break USA
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/29/business/29carried.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/08/business/08taxes.html
tax giveaway
council tax
stealth tax
tax return
tax shelter USA
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/10/business/10tax.html
Internal Revenue Service
IRS USA
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/i/internal_revenue_service/index.html
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/02/20/us/politics/AP-US-Plane-Crash-Tax-Protesters.html
Randy Bish
Pittsburgh, PA -- the Tribune-Review
Cagle
9 February 2009
taxpayer
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/jan/25/credit-crunch-recession
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/oct/12/banking-economy
at taxpayers' expense
tax burden
tax dodger
tax cheat
tax inspector
http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2009/oct/10/tax-inspector
tax delinquents USA
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2008-04-13-Taxside_N.htm
tax-free
http://money.guardian.co.uk/budget2007/story/0,,2039266,00.html
VAT
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/vat-up-to-20-as-osborne-piles-on-the-pain-2007269.html
cut / slash
VAT
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brown-and-darling-slash-vat-in-16318bn-tax-gamble-1031213.html
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/economics/pbr/article5213582.ece
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/nov/23/economy-taxandspending
VAT fraud
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/economics/story/0,,1844162,00.html
VAT villains
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/economics/story/0,,1844162,00.html
VAT fraudsters
http://business.guardian.co.uk/story/0,,1817486,00.html
HM Revenue & Customs
http://money.guardian.co.uk/tax/story/0,,1931619,00.html
tax evasion USA
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/t/tax_evasion/index.html
Serious Fraud Office
SFO
http://www.guardian.co.uk/baefiles/story/0,,2098723,00.html
wrongdoing
tax evader USA
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/13/business/13irs.html
offshore
offshore havens
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,6903,1446120,00.html
offshore tax haven
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/05/business/05tax.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/jul/19/hmvgroupbusiness.retail
tax haven
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/mar/24/budget-2010-tax-havens-belize
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/feb/09/tax-gap-boots-chemists
corporate tax breaks
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/05/business/05tax.html?hp
Mikhaela Reid
Cagle
5 February 2009
Tax Evaders Face Choice: Pay or Pray
October 13, 2009
The New York Times
By LYNNLEY BROWNING
Many Americans dread April 15, the deadline for filing their
income tax returns. But some well-heeled people are trembling over another
looming tax day: Oct. 15.
Thursday is the deadline for Americans to come clean about the money they have
hidden offshore, in places like Swiss bank accounts. No one can say with
certainty how much money is out there — the accounts are secret — but the hoard
may be tens of billions of dollars.
Several thousand wealthy people have come forward, hoping to avoid large fines
or possibly even prison. But many others are still weighing their options. The
choice is stark: They can confess and pay the penalties, or gamble that they
will not get caught. With the deadline only days away, tax lawyers say they are
being inundated by anxious clients.
“We’re seeing a flood of people,” said Scott D. Michel, a tax lawyer in
Washington. His firm, Caplin & Drysdale, has 350 clients who are preparing to
report their offshore accounts to the Internal Revenue Service. The firm has 14
lawyers handling their cases, one of which involves a tax bill of hundreds of
millions of dollars.
The deadline is part of a broad crackdown on Americans who use offshore accounts
to evade federal taxes. As part of the effort, United States authorities have
challenged the long tradition of banking secrecy in Switzerland, and, in
particular at UBS, that nation’s largest bank.
The I.R.S. is offering tax dodgers some leniency. Penalties will be reduced for
people who come forward by Oct. 15. They will be assessed fines equal to 5 to 20
percent of their tax bills, rather than the usual 50 percent. They also will pay
that penalty once, based on the highest balance in their offshore accounts over
the last six years, rather than for each of those six years.
At least 4,000 clients of UBS and other private banks have come forward in
recent months, a government official who had been briefed on the matter said.
One of those clients was Bruce Krasting. Last December, UBS, under sharp
scrutiny from federal officials, told him that the bank was closing his offshore
account and mailing him a check for the balance: $830,000.
Mr. Krasting, 59, realized that if he didn’t own up to the I.R.S., he had just
two other options: Find another offshore bank in Switzerland or the Caribbean —
and risk being discovered — or leave a trail for the I.R.S. by depositing his
money into a United States bank.
“I knew I was walking into a buzz saw that was going to cost me and my family
half a million dollars, and that it was triggered by UBS,” Mr. Krasting, a
former Wall Street trader, said in a telephone interview from his home in
Westchester County, N.Y. Worried about steeper penalties and potential
prosecution, he decided in the spring to disclose his identity to the I.R.S.
But scores of other UBS clients hope the I.R.S. will not catch them, tax lawyers
say. The bank divulged the names of 4,450 wealthy American clients to federal
authorities, but some clients bet that their names were not on the list.
It is a big gamble. Once the deadline passes, tax cheats will face stiffer
penalties and, if caught, will have a far greater chance of being prosecuted.
Prosecutors are already building criminal cases against 150 bank clients. UBS
turned over the names of many of those people in February, when the bank
admitted to having defrauded the federal government and agreed to pay $780
million to settle the matter. Six wealthy American clients of UBS have pleaded
guilty to tax evasion in recent months.
“A lot of people remain in denial and remain willing to take their chances,”
said Robert F. Katzberg, a white-collar criminal defense lawyer in New York, who
has nearly 20 clients with hidden accounts.
Some people who hold offshore accounts are trying to file amended returns for
previous years, pay their ordinary tax bills — minus the steeper penalties — and
hope that the I.R.S. does not detect that those taxes cover money that was
hidden offshore.
“The numbers are much larger on the amended returns side,” said a second
government official briefed on the matter. “It’s a high-stakes poker game.”
The whole issue has become a minefield for some wealthy families. Many offshore
accounts are held in the names of several family members, who do not always
agree on what they should do.
Bruce Zagaris, a tax and criminal defense lawyer in Washington, said that in
some instances, one family member was pushing to disclose an offshore account,
while another wanted to keep the money hidden. One of his cases involves parents
with an offshore trust for their three children, only two of whom had disclosed
the assets. If the parents want to disclose the accounts, “they have to rat on
one of their kids,” he said.
The I.R.S. disclosure program is also creating headaches in the hush-hush world
of private banking. It requires people to disclose the names, addresses and
telephone numbers of bankers, lawyers, accountants, tax advisers and trust
officials who helped them evade taxes.
One client of Martin Press, a tax lawyer in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., hid money in
Panama, another offshore tax haven. The client — a Florida surgeon, who spoke on
the condition he not be named, given his tax troubles — said his accountant
never told him he had to disclose the assets to the I.R.S.
“I really was convinced that the money was sitting somewhere legally and wasn’t
taxable,” the doctor said. But after reading about the crackdown, he entered the
I.R.S. disclosure program in July.
Tax Evaders Face
Choice: Pay or Pray, NYT, 13.10.2009,
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/13/business/13irs.html
Editorial
Once and Future Taxes
September 4, 2009
The New York Times
So far, the Obama administration’s plan for dealing with the
budget deficit — an estimated $9 trillion over a decade — is to not dig the hole
any deeper. That’s an important first step. President Obama deserves credit for
proposing ways to pay for his two big initiatives to date: health care reform
and energy legislation. Reducing the growth in health care costs, in particular,
is vital to curbing future deficits.
As for the hundreds of billions of dollars in economic stimulus, their impact on
long-term deficits is marginal because the spending is temporary. More
important, deficit spending is warranted in a recession because it eases the
downturn and in so doing, averts even worse damage to the economy and the
budget.
But, sooner than he may prefer, Mr. Obama will have to face up to what he has so
far avoided: the need to raise taxes broadly to rein in deficits.
The deficits are not of his making. Some two-thirds of the $9 trillion shortfall
resulted from policies that predate his administration; most of the rest is the
cost of policies that both parties consider necessary, like continued relief
from the alternative minimum tax.
But when he inherited the burden of the budget mess, Mr. Obama also inherited
the responsibility to clean it up. Neither economic growth nor spending cuts
will be enough to fix the projected shortfalls. Nor is there enough to be gained
by confining tax increases only to families making more than $250,000 a year, a
campaign promise that Mr. Obama still says he will keep.
Assuming the economy has begun to recover by 2010, next year would be the
natural time to start raising taxes. That’s because the Bush-era tax cuts are
set to expire at the end of 2010. If Congress does nothing, taxes will revert to
higher levels for everyone; if it extends all of the cuts, taxes will stay low
for everyone; if it extends some and lets others expire, taxes will stay low for
some taxpayers and go up for others.
Since 2010 is also a Congressional election year, lawmakers will be reluctant to
raise taxes at all, and certainly not without considerable support from the
White House, which is already worried about the 2010 elections.
Under these political pressures, Congress might be tempted to extend all of the
Bush cuts at least through 2011 — and that would be a dangerous move because
time is not necessarily on Mr. Obama’s side.
No one is angling to raise taxes during the recession, but the longer it takes
to show real progress on deficit reduction, the greater the possibility that the
nation’s creditors will demand higher interest rates on loans to the Treasury.
That would worsen the deficit by raising the nation’s borrowing costs. And with
the recovery of both the financial system and the housing market dependent on
low interest rates, an unanticipated or uncontrolled rate increase would be a
crisis in its own right.
The question then is not whether taxes must go up, but when, how and how much.
The White House budget director, Peter Orszag, has said the administration is
working to bring the deficit down in the 2011 budget, due early next year. But
when asked recently by The Wall Street Journal for details, including the
possibility of higher taxes on families making less than $250,000, Mr. Orszag
said that the administration was not yet giving any specifics on the next
budget.
In the meantime, the tax code remains inadequate to the task of raising
sufficient revenue — and high-income taxpayers are about to benefit once again.
Next year, a misguided law enacted in 2006 will take effect, giving high-income
taxpayers the chance to shelter much of their money from future tax increases.
The law will let high-income taxpayers transfer traditional individual
retirement accounts into so-called Roth I.R.A.’s. Unlike regular I.R.A.’s., no
tax is due when money is withdrawn from a Roth. That often makes Roths a better
deal, especially if you believe that tax rates will be higher in the years to
come — and they are bound to be higher. Taxpayers who switch to Roths will have
to pay tax upfront on the amounts they transfer, so the government will get a
jolt of revenue. But later, the transfers will be a money loser for the
government as high-income Americans and their heirs make tax-free withdrawals
that would have been taxable at tomorrow’s higher rates.
The Obama administration may not want to talk about the need for broad tax
increases while other issues dominate the agenda. But if the administration and
Congress do not act rationally and in a timely way, they risk being forced to
act by circumstances beyond their control. In that event, the economic harm to
Americans would be far greater than simply acknowledging the obvious and acting
accordingly.
Once and Future
Taxes, NYT, 4.9.2009,
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/04/opinion/04fri1.html
Obama Calls for New Curbs on Offshore Tax Havens
May 5, 2009
The New York Times
By JACKIE CALMES and EDMUND L. ANDREWS
WASHINGTON — President Obama on Monday called for curbing offshore tax havens
and corporate tax breaks to collect billions of dollars more from multinational
companies and wealthy individuals.
The move would appeal to growing populist anger among taxpayers but is likely to
open an epic battle with some major powers in American commerce.
With the proposals he outlined at the White House, the president sought to make
good on his campaign promise to end tax breaks “for companies that ship jobs
overseas.”
He estimated the changes would raise $210 billion over the next decade and help
offset tax cuts for middle-income taxpayers as well as a permanent tax credit
for companies’ research and development costs.
The changes, if enacted, would take effect in 2011, when administration
officials presume the economy will have recovered from the recession. But
business groups were quick to condemn the White House for proposing tax
increases amid a global downturn.
“This plan will reduce the ability of U.S. companies to compete in foreign
markets, which will not only reduce jobs, but will also cripple economic growth
here in the United States. It couldn’t come at a worse time,” said John J.
Castellani, president of the Business Roundtable, a trade association of major
businesses.
The proposals would especially hit pharmaceutical, technology, financial and
consumer goods companies — among them Goldman Sachs, Microsoft, Pfizer and
Procter & Gamble — that have major overseas operations or subsidiaries in tax
havens like the Cayman Islands.
They have some of the mightiest lobbying armies in Washington, as well as
influential patrons in Congress. That combination will test Mr. Obama’s ability
to stand up to powerful interests and marshal support among lawmakers at the
same time that he is trying to win passage of major health and energy measures.
At issue are tax laws that were originally intended to prevent multinational
corporations from being double-taxed, by the United States and by foreign
countries, by allowing companies to defer reporting their foreign income to the
Internal Revenue Service and to get tax credits in the United States for foreign
taxes paid.
Economists are divided over whether higher taxes would give corporations
incentives to move jobs overseas or impair economic growth at home. In the
coming debate, both Mr. Obama and the business lobby will claim that their way
will save jobs.
The top corporate tax rate is 35 percent, but the Treasury Department estimated
that in 2004, the most recent year for which data is available, American
multinationals paid $16 billion in taxes on $700 billion in foreign income — an
effective rate of 2.3 percent.
Mr. Obama’s tax-raising initiative comes amid government bailouts for major
financial institutions, auto companies and insurance giants, and polls show
growing opposition. In February, a Senate proposal to give multinational
companies a big tax cut if they brought profits back to the United States was
defeated by a surprisingly large margin.
The president, in his remarks, reflected the public’s restlessness in some of
his most populist language to date.
Mr. Obama said most Americans paid taxes as “an obligation of citizenship,” but
some businesses and rich people were “shirking” their duties, “aided and abetted
by a broken tax system, written by well-connected lobbyists on behalf of
well-heeled interests and individuals.”
“It’s a tax code full of corporate loopholes that makes it perfectly legal for
companies to avoid paying their fair share. It’s a tax code that makes it all
too easy for a number — a small number of individuals and companies to abuse
overseas tax havens to avoid paying any taxes at all,” the president said. “And
it’s a tax code that says you should pay lower taxes if you create a job in
Bangalore, India, than if you create one in Buffalo, New York.”
The Democratic chairmen of the House and Senate tax-writing committees,
Representative Charles B. Rangel of New York and Senator Max Baucus of Montana,
said in statements that some of Mr. Obama’s proposals reflect ideas from their
panels. But Mr. Baucus kept his distance, saying “further study is needed to
assess the impact of this plan on U.S. business.”
Congressional Republicans were relatively quiet. Senator Charles E. Grassley of
Iowa, the senior Republican on the Senate Finance Committee and a frequent
critic of tax schemes, said the president could “count on my support” to crack
down on abuses. “But if he’s using tax shelters as a stalking horse to raise
taxes on corporations at the cost of U.S. jobs, he’ll lose me.”
Business groups had feared Mr. Obama would seek repeal of the tax-deferral law
but he stopped short of that. Instead, he would prohibit companies from taking
deductions in the United States for expenses on overseas investments until they
have paid domestic taxes on the profits from those investments. Treasury
estimated the proposal would raise $60.1 billion from 2011 through 2019.
General Electric has deferred American taxes on $75 billion in foreign profits
by keeping them outside the United States, according to its annual report for
2008, and said it has no plan to ever repatriate that money. Citigroup has
deferred taxes on $22.8 billion in foreign income.
The administration would raise $86.5 billion by ending a practice in which
companies create foreign subsidiaries to shift income in ways that avoid taxes.
The Government Accountability Office has found that 83 of the 100 largest
American companies have subsidiaries in tax havens; it counted 83 subsidiaries
for Procter & Gamble alone. Financial services companies had even more, with
Citigroup showing 427 and Morgan Stanley, 273.
Another proposal would close a loophole that allows companies to inflate the
credits they claim for foreign taxes to the I.R.S., for an estimated $43 billion
in new revenues. Separate steps to crack down on wealthy individuals would raise
nearly $9 billion.
Tax experts, including some with Democratic leanings, caution that the proposals
could put American corporations at a competitive disadvantage. The United States
is part of a dwindling minority of industrialized countries that tries to tax
corporate profits on a global basis. Most European governments tax corporations
on the basis of their profits within their borders. “If other countries are
adopting systems that are friendlier to multinational corporations, then
companies will have an incentive to locate their corporate headquarters outside
the United States,” said Alan Auerbach, a professor of economics at the
University of California, Berkeley, who advised Senator John Kerry during his
2004 presidential campaign.
James Hines, an economics professor at the University of Michigan, suggested the
president’s proposals could be seen as creating unfair trade advantages for
domestic goods and services.
Obama Calls for New
Curbs on Offshore Tax Havens, NYT, 5.5.2009,
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/05/business/05tax.html
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