From Bloomberg.com:
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said the U.S. government will mount an “ambitious” program to crack down on companies that use offshore locales to avoid paying taxes.
Closing loopholes and hunting tax evaders are especially important at a time when the economy is deteriorating and the government is running a record budget deficit, Geithner told the Senate Finance Committee today in Washington.
“We’re going to have a much more ambitious effort to deal with offshore tax havens,” Geithner said in response to questions from the panel. Allowing companies and individuals to escape paying their share “isn’t fair, particularly given the scale of the fiscal challenges we inherited,” he said.
A congressional report released in January found that in 2007 83 of the 100 largest publicly traded U.S. companies had units in low-tax or no-tax jurisdictions like the Cayman Islands or the Isle of Man. They included American International Group Inc., Citigroup Inc., Bank of America Corp. and Morgan Stanley, all of which were given taxpayer money through the $700 billion financial rescue.
Some of Geithner’s counterparts in Europe have vowed to take similar action, and the issue may be discussed when finance ministers for the Group of 20 industrial and developing nations meet next week in the U.K.
Yesterday, German Finance Minister Peer Steinbrueck said Switzerland should change laws that shield foreign tax dodgers from investigation in their home countries.
