CLOSE TAX HIDEAWAYS

You probably thought it was difficult to save millions of dollars, but Sens. Carl Levin, a Democrat from Michigan, and Norm Coleman, a Republican from Minnesota, recently described a simple procedure nearly anyone could follow.

Begin by “buying” $9.5 billion worth of nonexistent stock, registering it with a fake corporation in an overseas tax haven. Then create a second fake overseas corporation, which buys the fake stock and immediately lends it back to the first fake corporation in exchange for the $9.5 billion worth of stock as security. The two exchanges leave the second corporation with a huge portfolio, among which it can pick falling stocks and sell them to people with real money to offset capital gains.

In the scheme Sens. Coleman and Levin examined through the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, one investor was able to offset $1.5 billion in gains. Another one off-set $143 million. The various lawyers, accountants and go-betweens in these schemes made $75 million. Some of that, of course, may end up paying for legal defense and probably they’ll want to pay taxes on it too.

The committee looked into six different kinds of offshore tax cheating, including some how-to descriptions that may explain the growing popularity of these dodges. Sham corporations to hide untaxed income, disguised ownership of corporations, complex trading strategies designed to fool tax collectors – all these efforts to avoid paying taxes inevitably means everyone else must make up the difference. The subcommittee estimates the annual lost taxes through these shelters amounts to between $40 billion and $70 billion a year.

The senators have asked for two sensible reforms – one that would presume the income from a trust in a tax haven is controlled by the owner of the trust and another that would establish a list of tax havens that do not cooperate with U.S. tax enforcement. Landing on such a list would eliminate the tax benefits for that jurisdiction, under the reform.

Just recently, however, the Government Accountability Office provided yet another way to help find this lost revenue. In recent testimony, it said the “tax gap” – the difference between what is owed and what is actually paid – could be shrunk by reducing the complexity of the tax system and increasing information on tax withholding information.

Simpler tax rules, it noted, “may limit opportunities for tax evasion, reducing intentional noncompliance by taxpayers who can misuse the complex code provisions to hide their noncompliance …” Additional withholding information would make avoiding taxes more difficult, although the GAO acknowledged any types of income are already subject to this reporting.

Congress has spent the last five years trying to cut any tax it can for some of its favorite Americans, but these off-the-books tax cuts ought to bother it enough to tighten its rules and give the IRS the means to collect money owed.