Tax Consequences Of Current Operations And Alternative Options For Expanding Abroad

One tax issue that presents no problem for a U.S. investor is the question of crediting taxes it has paid to a foreign country against taxes it would have to pay the U.S. on its federal return.

This not only is giving huge breaks towards companies who exported the U.S job market overseas, but serves as an incentive to continue to export jobs overseas due to a lesser overhead cost and tax exemptions of doing so. The Inventory Property Sales, wealth created overseas of American companies is taxed in the nation or region in where it is created, and the U.S. gives a tax credit for that amount in order to avoid double taxation. However, this exception has lead towards a huge amount of job exporting and tax evasion. Some companies have amassed disproportionate amount of such tax credits “inventory” as it is called. According to Sarah from the Financial Times “To be able utilize their inventory credits, companies artificially boost foreign income through a ‘title passage rule’ that allows companies to allocate 50 percent of income from U.S. production sold in another country as income generated by that foreign country the ‘property sales’” which leads to a further enriching of shareholders and CEO’s while passing the economic burden onto the American public. The 5 year cost to Government from just Inventory Property Sales credits is $16.7 billion. Who benefits are Multinationals with operations in high-tax foreign countries. Not to mention the continuous outsourcing of American jobs due to these loopholes that seem to incentives American corporations to leave the United States

However, the companies only have to pay the U.S. tax for foreign revenues once they bring the profits back to the United States. As a result of these current tax laws, U.S. companies that seek to avoid high corporate tax rates hold their foreign earned profits overseas. “It just makes no sense to pay a substantial tax on it,” said Joseph Kennedy, a senior fellow at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (Rubin, R.). It is far too easy for an IT corporation to create a patent in a foreign country and direct revenue to a corporation within that country, thus avoiding the much higher U.S. tax rates. According to Joint Committee on Taxation estimates, the lost revenue is increasing over time as corporations find even more creative ways to make their U.S. profits look like offshore income (Richards, K., & Craig, J.). As result, multinational American corporations have as much as $2 trillion held in overseas subsidiaries and if brought into the United States with the current tax laws, the federal government could benefit by nearly $50 billion per year.

The current law that controls the export of goods from a U.S. manufacturer to a foreign buyer also controls the re-export of those goods beyond the boundaries of the country of the original foreign buyer.

Throughout years large American industrial companies have been running away from U.S. taxes, but there has been a new change. Companies such as Apple and Google have been affected by a change foreign countries are going through collecting higher taxes than before. It seems as if no longer can these companies get away with paying low taxes. This is happening because the European Commission have passed an order to collect high taxes. One example is Ireland who was ordered to collect fourteen billion dollars from Apple, which brought a surprise to this company. Companies have run out of places to run and pay one percent or less of taxes in foreign places, instead of paying back home.

The main objective of many companies is to minimize their tax obligations. Jeffers (2014) discussed the reason of why companies adopt tax inversion strategies. The researcher indicated that the income maximization is a major reason of companies attempting to reduce their tax liability (pp. 100-101). Tax inversion strategies provide companies an advantage to lower income tax rate. Today, U.S. corporations renounce its U.S. citizenship and move to low-tax countries. Companies that reincorporate oversees are not obligated to pay U.S. taxes on earning income (p. 99). Many countries implement tax competition strategies to attract and retain businesses. Well-known companies, such as Exxon Mobil, Hewlett Packard, Tyco, General Electric, PepsiCo, etc. take benefits of tax shelter opportunities overseas (p. 102). Other benefits of the jurisdiction abroad are flexible banking laws and simplified litigation processes.

“The United States has the highest corporate tax rate of the 34 developed, free-market nations that make up the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The marginal corporate tax rate in the United States is 35% at the federal level… according to the 2013 OECD Tax Database. The global average is much lower, at 25%” (Fontinelle, 2014). Even though there are ways for businesses to decrease or even avoid these payments, this high figure deters foreign investors from considering the United States for business and sends them looking in more favorable countries like Canada or Ireland. Adding to pushing away potential foreign investors, U.S. firms flee to those tax favorable places to avoid it. “When these companies move their headquarters or create foreign subsidiaries, jobs and profits move overseas” (Fontinelle,

2. The primary means in which a corporation is able to do so is to qualify for benefits in the 1996 U.S. Model Treaty. There are actually a couple of different ways in which corporations can access these benefits in international transactions. One of the ways is if that corporation is regarded as a fiscally transparent partnership in another

However, the introduction of such a law becomes increasingly difficult when the companies being questioned are some of the largest and wealthiest in the world. In order to truly understand the stature of these companies, one would need to look into some of the statistics regarding them. Remarkably, according to Al Jazeera America “the largest 500 U.S. companies would owe an estimated $620 billion in U.S. taxes” if they had to declare all their overseas stockpiles, of around $2.1 trillion (“Al Jazeera America”). In addition, it found that “three-quarters of the 500 biggest companies utilize tax havens”. The top three offenders included Apple, General Electric and Microsoft. In many cases according to the report, the money is not being utilized to improve foreign economies. By this they mean to say that, U.S. businesses were not using their overseas profit to build factories and employ individuals. Instead, the overseas profit was a result of accounting tricks purposely implemented to benefit the business alone. To put all of this in perspective, the United States is losing billions of dollars to foreign economies. These taxes are being introduced into countries such as Ireland and Luxembourg. In other words the money that should be invested in the United States of America on public services, is being

sales made in this countries. I am sure other countries do this to U.S companies and if we did it

The income earned by the U.S. individuals and corporations in the foreign countries or foreign source are taxed by the U.S. government, even though other countries also tax any income earned within their borders. To offset this double taxation of income by two different countries, the U.S. grants both individuals and corporations a foreign tax credit (FTC) that can be used to offset income taxes assessed by a foreign country on the income earned there (Foreign Tax Credit, FTC, n.d.). The FTC is allowable for foreign income taxes and other similar taxes, such as excess profit and war profit taxes. However, only income taxes qualify for the credit. The Value Added Taxes (VAT) and property, sales and severance taxes do not qualify, although they may be deductible.

Intercompany transactions could occur across national borders, it would lead MNC companies to get more exposure to the differences of the tax regulations between countries. This might lead MNC companies to set up their objective to minimize their taxes through the use of discretionary transfer prices. These issues are attracted the attention of the member of the U.S. senate, foreign governments and international organization such as the OECD, G20 and European Union (EU).

There are always business risk when it comes to expanding a company, especially from an international standpoint. There are many strategic risk that needs to be evaluated in order to expand the company successfully. Examining the possible risk of foreign currency exposure, basic functions of international banking/financial market, support of long term financing of operations, and assessment of opportunities that can be implemented within the company. There are risk on three dimensions of international finance, economic trends of the country, impact of globalization and monetary system. All of these situations will be discussed in this paper.

The import companies really don’t lose much when the import relief goes up. The cost of importing goods to the United States and paying the import relief is most often cheaper than manufacturing goods in the United States. The ITC looks at a company’s earnings before taxes. To circumvent the ITC the managers of import companies often use multiple accrual accounts. By playing somewhat of a shell game with the ITC the import companies are able to hide assets or shift them to the next quarter to show a lower profit margin. The author conducted a cross sectional investigation of the accrual accounts of import companies.

Explain how the article builds on the seminal work of Oviatt and McDougall in their paper,.