Ending the pass-through tax loophole for Big Business

  In 2012, more than 100,000 big U.S. businesses managed to shelter billions of dollars of income in a single tax haven and pay no corporate income tax on it.

  This tax haven is not Panama, Switzerland, or the Cayman Islands. In fact, it cannot even be found on a map—rather, it exists in the pages of the U.S. tax code. These businesses—with revenue of more than $10 million each—managed to pay no U.S. corporate income tax by pretending to be small businesses and thus saved their wealthy owners billions of dollars.

Harry Stein: Pfizer’s tax-dodging bid for AstraZeneca shows need to tighten U.S. tax rules

  American drug maker Pfizer is attempting to acquire AstraZeneca, the United Kingdom’s second-largest pharmaceutical company. If successful, Pfizer would avoid paying billions of dollars in U.S. taxes by becoming a U.K.-based corporation, and Pfizer executives have made these tax benefits a central element of their pitch to AstraZeneca. This corporate maneuver, in which a U.S. corporation becomes a foreign corporation for tax purposes, is called a corporate inversion. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have fought back against corporate inversions for years, and they could be stopped if Congress were to strengthen laws passed 10 years ago.