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Panama Papers Highlight Secretive Banking on US Soil
Matthew Gardner, Executive Director of The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, an arm of Citizens for Tax Justice (a public interest research and advocacy organization focusing on tax policies and their impact), discusses his op-ed for CNN, which points out that despite the public and media attention the Panama Papers have garnered, the actions described in these documents are employed, possibly on a larger level, here in the U.S.
Garner said the same untraceable shell corporations that are being used to shelter assets in off shore tax havens, as identified in the Panama Papers, are being used for the same purposes in the U.S. because of lax laws in Delaware, Nevada and a few other states.
Garner also discussed the Obama administration's latest attempt to strengthen some of these lax laws with the announcement on Tuesday that the Treasury Department is seeking to make it more difficult to accomplish what is known as corporate inversions, in which U.S. companies combine with foreign firms to reduce U.S. taxes.
The Treasury Department’s new rule nixed a merger between U.S.-based drugmaker Pfizer Inc. and rival Allergan and the company’s plans to move to Ireland to lower its tax bill.