Portside

The claim that many U.S. companies are moving their headquarters overseas because U.S. corporate tax rates make them uncompetitive is “largely fact-free,” USC law professor and former Joint Tax Committee staff director Edward Kleinbard concludes in a new paper.

While many firms and their lobbyists highlight the 35 percent top U.S. corporate rate, that’s not what companies actually pay, Kleinbard explains.  The effective tax rate that U.S. multinationals face on their worldwide income — that is, the share of this income that they pay in taxes — is well below this statutory rate.  A big reason is that multinationals report vast amounts of their income as coming from tax havens where they pay little or no tax, even if they have few staff and do little business there.

Kleinbard also explains that the 2004 repatriation tax holiday, which allowed multinationals to bring profits held overseas back to the United States at a temporary, vastly reduced tax rate, gave them a big incentive to stockpile billions more in tax havens and await another tax holiday.  These large stashes of profits in tax havens are an important reason — Kleinbard thinks the key reason — why many companies are considering moving their headquarters overseas.  By “inverting,” these companies can basically declare their own, permanent tax holiday and avoid ever paying U.S. taxes on foreign-held profits.  And once inverted, they can use legal avoidance schemes to effectively get those profits to their U.S. shareholders.

In other words, multinationals are already using tax havens to achieve zero or extremely low tax rates.  Firms considering inversions are searching not for a “competitive” tax rate but a zero tax rate by ensuring that those profits remain “stateless” — that is, taxed nowhere at all. (Echoing a famous line from Mae West, Kleinbard’s paper is titled “‘Competitiveness’ Has Nothing to Do With It.”)

Kleinbard’s solution has three parts:

1. Make it harder for a U.S. multinational to invert.
2. Prevent companies that do invert from effectively distributing their “foreign profits” to U.S. shareholders without paying U.S. tax.
3. Make it harder for all U.S. multinationals to claim that U.S.-earned profits were actually earned in tax havens and low-tax countries.