International Tax Avoidance: Bain Capital?

Everyone agrees that our tax system is broken. It is too
complex. It interferes with the free market too much, and, worst
of all, it doesn’t equitably raise the revenue we need to fund
programs enacted by Congress. Most of the proposed tax system
fixes are the equivalent of putting a Band-Aid on a spurting
artery. It is time to stop the auction system of tax legislation and
go back to basics: raising the revenue we need with as few special
interest subsidies as possible. Now is the time to do it, because
this is one of the few times that the public’s attention is focused
on the issue, which will make it much harder to hide special
interest deals behind a cloud of complexity.
Corporate tax laws are so complex that even with the best
intentions, it is almost impossible to comply with them. And the
temptations to cheat are overwhelming, particularly for the
multinational corporations that can use transfer pricing and tax
havens to avoid taxation. Every IRS commissioner who has
testified on transfer pricing has admitted that the Service cannot
police it. This gives those multinational corporations a real
competitive advantage over domestic corporations paying much
higher taxes.
Abolishing corporate income taxes would make sense if it
were possible to impute the income to shareholders and collect
taxes from them. But far too many shareholders are tax exempt or
foreign, so that’s not possible.

Is this the reason Romney won't release his tax returns? I'll continue with this issue next Thursday.

Martin Lobel
Lobel, Novins & Lamont, LLP
Washington, DC