U.S. corporations complaining that their overseas earnings are trapped there because taxes are too high to bring home have already moved huge sums back onto American soil, a Senate investigation found.

 

The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations found that 27 large businesses, including Apple, Google and Microsoft, had invested almost $250 billion (46%) of their offshore tax-deferred corporate earnings in the United States. They did so without paying any taxes, while investing the money in American banks, bonds, stocks and other assets.

 

“Those foreign earnings are not trapped or locked offshore at all,” Senator Carl Levin (D-Michigan), chairman of the subcommittee, told iWatch News. “About half of the so-called offshore funds were actually onshore.”

 

Some of the firms have played leading roles in lobbying Congress for a tax holiday, arguing that they should not have to pay the difference between U.S income taxes and those (usually lower) taxes in other countries where the earnings were made.

-Noel Brinkerhoff

 

Senate Committee Finds Most 'Trapped' Offshore Income is Already in U.S. (by John Aloysius Farrell, iWatch News)

Offshore Funds Located Onshore (Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations) (pdf)

Big Corporations Pressure Congress to Stop Taxing Overseas Profits (by Noel Brinkerhoff, AllGov)