When an American Company Redomiciles to the Cayman Islands, What Lesson Should We Learn?
Another American company has decided to expatriate for tax reasons. This process has been going on for decades, with companies giving up their U.S. charters (a form of business citizenship) and redomiciling in low-tax jurisdictions such as Bermuda, Ireland, Switzerland, Panama, Hong Kong, and the Cayman Islands.
The companies that choose to expatriate usually fit a certain profile (this applies to individuals as well). They earn a substantial share of their income in other countries and they are put at a competitive disadvantage because of America’s “worldwide” tax system.
More specifically, worldwide taxation requires firms to not only pay tax to foreign governments on their foreign-source income, but they are also supposed to pay additional tax on this income to the IRS — even though the money was not earned in America and even though their foreign-based competitors rarely are subject to this type of double taxation.
In this most recent example, an energy company with substantial operations in Asia moved its charter to the Cayman Islands, as reported by digitaljournal.com:
Greenfields Petroleum Corporation…, an independent exploration and production company with assets in Azerbaijan, is pleased to announce that the previously announced corporate redomestication … from Delaware to the Cayman Islands has been successfully completed.
Because it is a small firm, the move by GPC probably won’t attract much attention from the politicians. But “corporate expatriation” has generated considerable controversy in recent years when involving big companies such as Ingersoll-Rand, Transocean, and Stanley Works (now Stanley Black & Decker).
English Anti-Tax Haven Ideologues Are Just as Foolish and Ignorant as their American Cousins
There’s a supposed expose’ in the U.K.-based Daily Mail about how major British companies have subsidiaries in low-tax jurisdictions. It even includes this table with the ostensibly shocking numbers.
This is quite akin to the propaganda issued by American statists. Here’s a table from a report issued by a left-wing group that calls itself “Business and Investors Against Tax Haven Abuse.”
At the risk of being impolite, I’ll ask the appropriate rhetorical question: What do these tables mean?
Are the leftists upset that multinational companies exist? If so, there’s really no point in having a discussion.
Are they angry that these firms are legally trying to minimize tax? If so, they must not understand that management has a fiduciary obligation to maximize after-tax returns for shareholders.
Are they implying that these businesses are cheating on their tax returns? If so, they clearly do not understand the difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion.
Are they agitating for governments to impose worldwide taxation so that companies are double-taxed on any income earned (and already subject to tax) in other jurisdictions? If so, they should forthrightly admit this is their goal, notwithstanding the destructive, anti-competitive impact of such a policy.
Or, perhaps, could it be the case that leftists on both sides of the Atlantic don’t like tax competition? But rather than openly argue for tax harmonization and other policies that would lead to higher taxes and a loss of fiscal sovereignty, they think they will have more luck expanding the power of government by employing demagoguery against the big, bad, multinational companies and small, low-tax jurisdictions.
To give these statists credit, they are being smart. Tax competition almost certainly is the biggest impediment that now exists to restrain big government. Greedy politicians understand that high taxes may simply lead the geese with the golden eggs to fly across the border. Indeed, competition between governments is surely the main reason that tax rates have dropped so dramatically in the past 30 years. This video explains.
The IRS’s Tax Rate on Google’s Foreign-Source Income Is 2.4 Percentage Points Too High
There’s been considerable attention to the news that the IRS only managed to grab 2.4 percent of Google’s overseas income. As this Bloomberg article indicates, many statists act as if this is a scandal (including a morally bankrupt quote from a Baruch College professor who thinks a company’s lawful efforts to lower its tax liability is “evil” and akin to robbing citizens).
Google Inc. cut its taxes by $3.1 billion in the last three years using a technique that moves most of its foreign profits through Ireland and the Netherlands to Bermuda. Google’s income shifting — involving strategies known to lawyers as the “Double Irish” and the “Dutch Sandwich” — helped reduce its overseas tax rate to 2.4 percent, the lowest of the top five U.S. technology companies by market capitalization, according to regulatory filings in six countries. …Google, the owner of the world’s most popular search engine, uses a strategy that…takes advantage of Irish tax law to legally shuttle profits into and out of subsidiaries there, largely escaping the country’s 12.5 percent income tax. The earnings wind up in island havens that levy no corporate income taxes at all. Companies that use the Double Irish arrangement avoid taxes at home and abroad as the U.S. government struggles to close a projected $1.4 trillion budget gap and European Union countries face a collective projected deficit of 868 billion euros. …U.S. Representative Dave Camp of Michigan, the ranking Republican on the House Ways and Means Committee, and other politicians say the 35 percent U.S. statutory rate is too high relative to foreign countries. …Google is “flying a banner of doing no evil, and then they’re perpetrating evil under our noses,” said Abraham J. Briloff, a professor emeritus of accounting at Baruch College in New York who has examined Google’s tax disclosures. “Who is it that paid for the underlying concept on which they built these billions of dollars of revenues?” Briloff said. “It was paid for by the United States citizenry.”
Congressman Dave Camp, the ranking Republican (and presumably soon-to-be Chairman) of the House tax-writing committee sort of understands the problem. The article mentions that he wants to investigate whether America’s corportate tax rate is too high. The answer is yes, of course, as explained in this video, but the bigger issue is that the IRS should not be taxing economic activity that occurs outside U.S. borders. This is a matter of sovereignty and good tax policy. From a sovereignty persepective, if income is earned in Ireland, the Irish government should decide how and when that income is taxed. The same is true for income in Bermuda and the Netherlands.
From a tax policy perspective, the right approach is “territorial” taxation, which is the common-sense notion of only taxing activity inside national borders. It’s no coincidence that all pro-growth tax reform plans, such as the flat tax and national sales tax, use this approach. Unfortunately, America is one of the world’s few nations to utilize the opposite approach of “worldwide” taxation, which means that U.S. companies face the competitive disadvantage of having two nations tax the same income. Fortunately, the damaging impact of worldwide taxation is mitigated by a policy known as deferral, which allows multinationals to postpone the second layer of tax.
Perversely, the Obama Administration wants to undermine deferral, thus putting American multinationals at an even greater disadvantage when competing in global markets. As this video explains, that would be a major step in the wrong direction. Instead, policy makers should junk America’s misguided worldwide system and replace it with territorial taxation.
Law Students: Use Your Deferment to Work for Liberty!
Many law firms continue to ask their incoming first-year associates to defer their start dates (from a few months to a full year) and are offering stipends to these deferred associates to work at public interest organizations. The Cato Institute has been running a successful deferred associates program and we always consider applications on a rolling basis.
We invite third-year law students and others facing firm deferrals to apply to work at our Center for Constitutional Studies. This is an opportunity to assist projects ranging from Supreme Court amicus briefs to policy papers to the Cato Supreme Court Review. Start and end dates are flexible. Interested students and recent graduates should email a cover letter, resume, transcript, and writing sample, along with any specific details of their deferment (timing, availability of stipend, etc.) to Jonathan Blanks at jblanks@cato.org.
Please feel free to pass the above information to your friends and colleagues. For information on Cato’s programs for non-graduating students, contact Joey Coon at jcoon@cato.org.
Obama’s Big Tax Hike on U.S. Multinationals Means Fewer American Jobs and Reduced Competitiveness
The new budget from the White House contains all sorts of land mines for taxpayers, which is not surprising considering the President wants to extract another $1.3 trillion over the next ten years. While that’s a discouragingly big number, the details are even more frightening. Higher tax rates on investors and entrepreneurs will dampen incentives for productive behavior. Reinstating the death tax is both economically foolish and immoral. And higher taxes on companies almost surely is a recipe for fewer jobs and reduced competitiveness.
The White House is specifically going after companies that compete in foreign markets. Under current law, the “foreign-source” income of multinationals is subject to tax by the IRS even though it already is subject to all applicable tax where it is earned (just as the IRS taxes foreign companies on income they earn in America). But at least companies have the ability to sometimes delay when this double taxation occurs, thanks to a policy known as deferral. The White House thinks that this income should be taxed right away, though, claiming that “…deferring U.S. tax on the income from the investment may cause U.S. businesses to shift their investments and jobs overseas, harming our domestic economy.”
In reality, deferral protects American companies from being put at a competitive disadvantage when competing with companies from other nations. As I explained in this video, this policy protects American jobs. Coincidentally, the American Enterprise Institute just held a conference last month on deferral and related international tax issues. Featuring experts from all viewpoints, there was very little consensus. But almost every participant agreed that higher taxes on multinationals will lead to an exodus of companies, investment, and jobs from America. Obama’s proposal is good news for China, but bad news for America.
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