Corporate Tax Evasion

The article mentions that much of the Google profit ends up in Bermuda, which has no tax! All you need to do is ensure that your operation in Bermuda is charging a healthy fee of some form to your Irish and UK operations, which substantially reduces your profitability in those areas, whilst hoisting it considerably in your tax-free haven.The problem is that such fees can be perfectly legitimate. It is difficult to judge a fee as unjustifiable just because as a "side-effect" it very effectively transfers the tax burden from a high-tax state to a low-tax state. And that is the quandry facing the HMRC and other tax offices.

Can't you see the Tea Party voter in the booth (closet), realizing the full secrecy of the ballot, and thinking, "I'd rather vote for the negro than that effin' Mormon..."I can. I told all and sundry there was no way an enthusiastic conservative Christian tide could wash the Angel Moroni, the golden tablets and the special underwear off of Romney.That's my analysis, and I'm sticking to it.And given the massive tax avoidance/evasion that Romney managed (the obvious reason he wouldn't release more tax returns), this isn't really off-topic.

So (short of world government) what is to be done?Invade Bermuda.....?

To get it very on topic - What are some examples of Romney's corporate tax evasion?

You are so cute with your questions! The easy answer is that full reveal is in his tax returns, which Romney refused to disclose--in contravention of political custom and his father's precedent.Or we could note that in the two years worth of returns he did release, he paid only about 15% on millions, using the loophole-the-size-of-the-deficit, Bush tax cut capital gains rate for the wealthy.But we can do better than that.Let's start with his Individual Retirement Account, created and funded entirely during his years with Bain Capital. These accounts were created to encourage middle-class earners to provide for their own retirement, since pensions are so passe.This occurred during a time when the limit for an SEP-IRA annual contribution--funded entirely by an employer--was $30,000.AbE: Regular wage earners were limited to about $6000 in annual IRA contributions.Some background from Bloomberg:

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The most mysterious of the unexplained mysteries about Mitt Romney’s considerable wealth is how he was able to amass between $21 million and $102 million in his individual retirement account during the 15 years he was at Bain Capital LLC.

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How did he do it, given the relatively small amounts that the law permits to be contributed to such a plan on an annual basis? Romney has not explained this conundrum, and seeing as he wants to become president, he would be wise to start talking -- if for no other reason than there might be many Americans who would like to emulate what he did.

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During Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital -- from 1984 to 1999, although a recent Boston Globe article uncovered Romney having a role at Bain until 2002 -- the firm used a so-called SEP-IRA, which is like a 401(k) retirement plan but is funded entirely by the employer and has a much higher maximum contribution: about $30,000 annually during the period Romney was at Bain. Assuming Romney maxed out these tax-deferred contributions, he would have invested roughly $450,000 in his SEP-IRA during his years at Bain.

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The short answer is that he took advantage of leveraged buyouts to put nominally "low value" stocks into his IRA, knowing that the shedding of debt and workers that typified the Bain Capital approach would rapidly balloon those values up to their real world value.Smart? Sure.The actions of a fully engaged capitalist invested in the health of his own nation's economy? Hardly.Legal? There are strong opinions both ways, but the IRS has little interest in pursuing any investigation that might appear as post-election persecution.A familiar pattern? You bet. He testified in divorce court for his friend, the founder of Staples, on the scant value to be found in Staples stocks--and created a special class of low value Staples stock to be used to payoff the former Mrs. Founder.Will that do for starters?Edited by Omnivorous, : No reason given.

It's probably time for a water break, because this crap is uncalled for.

So, in the first reply I addressed the Olympic quality of Romney's tax avoidance, using mechanisms that skirt the boundary of legality.The New York Times' Michael Graetz took a hard look at what Romney's meager tax record releases showed. I'll provide a lengthy quote, since NYT has a paywall, and I cannot improve on Mr. Graetz's reporting.

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Another suggestion is that in 2009 he paid income taxes significantly below the 13.9 percent he paid in 2010. This is more plausible, and potentially more damaging politically, even if perfectly legal.

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After all, the one year’s tax returns that he has released raise doubt about his campaign’s claims that his offshore accounts did not save him one penny of tax. Putting business assets into an individual retirement account invested in a Cayman Islands corporation allows Mr. Romney to avoid the unrelated business income tax a 35 percent levy on at least some of his I.R.A.’s earnings, a tax that he would have had to pay if his I.R.A. were held directly by a financial institution in the United States.

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With an I.R.A. account of $20 million to $101 million, the tax savings would be more than a few pennies.

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The I.R.A. also allows Mr. Romney to diversify his large holdings tax-free, avoiding the 15 percent tax on capital gains that would otherwise apply. His financial disclosure further reveals that his I.R.A. freed him from paying currently the 35 percent income tax on hundreds of thousands of dollars of interest income each year.

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Given the extraordinary size of his I.R.A., we have to presume that Mr. Romney valued the assets he put in his retirement account at far less than he would have sold them for. Otherwise it is quite a trick to turn contributions that are limited to $30,000 to $50,000 a year into the $20 million to $101 million he now has there. But we cannot be certain; his meager disclosure of tax records and financial information does not indicate what kind of assets were put into the I.R.A.

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Mr. Romney’s Cayman Islands and Bermuda corporations also probably allowed him to avoid limitations on deductions for investment expenditures that would otherwise apply. So we don’t need any more tax returns to know that Mr. Romney is an Olympic-level athlete at the tax avoidance game. Rich people don’t send their money to Bermuda or the Cayman Islands for the weather.

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Moreover, we have no clue whether Mr. Romney paid any gift tax on transfers, now valued at $100 million, to a trust he set up in 1995 for the benefit of his five sons. Until this year, the federal gift tax had a lifetime exemption of $1 million, and it taxed gifts in excess of that amount at rates between 29 and 44 percent. A gift of $100 million to one’s children could, therefore, require paying a tax of as much as $29 million to $44 million.

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But every good tax professional knows that gift tax returns are rarely audited, except after the transferor’s death. And normally the I.R.S. cannot challenge such a return after three years from its filing. But if the values of the gifts were not properly appraised and disclosed on Mr. Romney’s gift tax returns, a challenge may still be possible. If he did not file any gift tax return, he would still be liable for the tax, plus interest and penalties.

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Based on his aggressive tax planning, revealed in the 2010 returns he has released and his approval of a notably dicey tax avoidance strategy in 1994 when he headed the audit committee of the board of Marriott International, my bet is that if Mr. Romney filed a gift tax return for these transfers at all he put a low or even zero value on the gifts, certainly a small fraction of the price at which he would have sold the transferred assets to an unrelated party. Otherwise, he should be happy to release his gift tax returns. According to a partner at Mr. Romney’s trustee’s law firm, valuing carried interests, such as Mr. Romney’s interests in the private equity company Bain Capital, at zero for gift tax purposes was common advice given to clients like Mr. Romney in the 1990s and early 2000s.

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If detected, undervaluing large gifts to one’s children could provoke large penalties from the I.R.S. These are the kinds of tax penalties that even multinational corporations try to avoid because they fear how the public would react to the adverse publicity that would inevitably follow.

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Read this part again, slowly: "According to a partner at Mr. Romney’s trustee’s law firm, valuing carried interests, such as Mr. Romney’s interests in the private equity company Bain Capital, at zero for gift tax purposes was common advice given to clients like Mr. Romney in the 1990s and early 2000s."Dodge the gift tax by declaring the value of the gift (worth many millions) to be zero. And it wasn't just Romney, it was commonly done by people in his economic class.That's not tax avoidance, that's tax evasion, carefully crafted in a tax area rarely subjected to IRS review.He should be audited. He won't be.

Normal people do not brush off such suggestions as nonsense when there is plenty of evidence to suggest such things were indeed possible.

1) If actual, credible evidence that President Obama was not actually legally capable of holding the office to which he was elected, it would have been presented and held up in court, and his Presidency would not be about to enter its second term. There have been lawsuits, and they have been struck down because the "evidence" is a bunch of bullshit. "Normal people" brush off accusations of foreign birth when a preponderance of evidence exists falsifying such a claim. Evidence like a birth certificate from Hawaii, or the fact that, since his mother was an American citizen, Obama would count as a natural born American even if he was born in Kenya, just like children born to parents on vacation or serving in the military stationed in foreign lands.John McCain, entertainingly enough, was actually not born in the US. He's still a natural-born American citizen, though, because his parents were citizens.The "birther" claim is worse than false - even if it were true it wouldn't affect Obama's eligibility to be President. That is why "normal people," meaning people with an IQ above freezing and possessing the reasoning capability of a housefly, dismiss such ridiculous claims.The "birther" nonsense is used by dramatic attention-seekers like Trump, and otherwise is exclusively used by absolute loons with the biggest case of "sour grapes" in recent memory.2) Being a Muslim would not affect President Obama's eligibility to be the President of the United States. The office of the President does not afford the power to enact Sharia law or any of the other nonsense involved in the "steal Muslim" conspiracy theories. Therefore, even if such speculation were true, it would be utterly meaningless.And, you know...if Obama was secretly on Al Qaeda's side, he probably wouldn't have ordered the strike that killed bin Laden, and he probably wouldn't be using drones to kill so many Muslims.It's unbelievable that people still cling to these absurd bits of insanity.

My mother is an immigrant, Mexican to be exact. And she worked her ass off here in the U.S. as a maid for 20 years. My parents are retired now, get $15 in food stamps a month (the only welfare they have ever received), and live in Mexico because that's what they can afford on their measly SS.I take great exception to snot-nosed bozos who don't have a lick of sense. And FEY is a great example of that. But he's simply not worth arguing with.

It is mostly used by racists, to encourage people to vote their racism while allowing them to delude themselves that they are not actually racist.

Well...See, there's an argument about that. The law that you'd think would apply, the one you're referring to - children born overseas to American parents are citizens, regardless - refers to children born "born beyond the sea or out of the limits and jurisdiction of the United States". But the Panama Canal Zone, a US protectorate at the time of McCain's birth, isn't outside the jurisdiction of the United States. Yet, it's not American territory, either. At the time of McCain's birth it existed in a legal gray zone - a gray zone that, in several court rulings, was interpreted to mean that people born in the Canal Zone weren't automatically American citizens.Now, in 1937, Congress closed that loophole and affirmed under statute that anyone born to American parents regardless of their location was American. But the thing is, John McCain is older than that law. That's how fucking old that dude is. And being older than the law that granted him unambiguous citizenship might have meant that he was not a natural born American citizen.It's an argument, anyway, and one advanced by actual lawyers - including law professor Gabriel Chin:

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In the most detailed examination yet of Senator John McCain’s eligibility to be president, a law professor at the University of Arizona has concluded that neither Mr. McCain’s birth in 1936 in the Panama Canal Zone nor the fact that his parents were American citizens is enough to satisfy the constitutional requirement that the president must be a natural-born citizen.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/11/us/politics/11mccain.htmlAll of that said, though, who could possibly have had standing to file the suit?

That is not true. Just because no judge has been willing to take the case, doesn't mean there isn't credible evidence that his long form birth certificate is legal and never been tampered with. I have read reasonable arguments that not only was his birth certificate tampered with in 2008 but his hawaian newpaper birth announcements were tampered with in 2008 as well.

I have an iq of 136 and I do not think such claims are ridiculous. I am just not brainwashed like you and your fellow travelers are. You haven't proven the birther claims are false. You only imagine them to be proven in your elitist snobby liberal mind.

Go ahead and knock my rating down to 1 all of you communist hellbound degenerates. You can all go to hell as far as I am concerned.