Speaking of taxes ... and tax cheats

Is there a justification in CST for this?

New York Times
August 1, 2006

Tax Cheats Called Out of Control
By DAVID CAY JOHNSTON

So many superrich Americans evade taxes using offshore accounts that law enforcement cannot control the growing misconduct, according to a Senate report that provides the most detailed look ever at high-level tax schemes.

Among the billionaires cited in the report are the owner of the New York Jets football team, Robert Wood Johnson IV; the producer of the “Mighty Morphin Power Rangers” children’s show, Haim Saban; and two Texas businessmen, Charles and Sam Wyly, who the Center for Public Integrity found in 2000 were the ninth-largest contributors to President Bush.

Mr. Johnson and Mr. Saban, who are portrayed as victims in the report, are scheduled to testify today before the Senate Permanent Investigations subcommittee. They are expected to say that professional advisers assured them their deals to avoid taxes were more likely lawful than not. The Wyly brothers told the committee that they would invoke their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and thus were not called to testify. The report characterizes them as active participants in tax schemes.

Cheating now equals about 7 cents out of each dollar paid by honest taxpayers, as much as $70 billion a year, the report estimated.

“The universe of offshore tax cheating has become so large that no one, not even the United States government, could go after all of it,” said Senator Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat whose staff ran the investigation.

Senator Norm Coleman, the Minnesota Republican who is chairman of the subcommittee, adopted the minority report on Sunday as the product of the full committee.

The report details how the Quellos Group, a tax shelter boutique based in Seattle, “concocted a tax shelter” using $9.6 billion “worth of fake securities transactions that were used to generate billions of dollars of fake capital losses.”

Senator Levin said that when investigators asked for trading records they were first told the trades were private, over-the-counter transactions. He said investigators asked for trading tickets or other evidence of who owned the $9.6 billion worth of stock and were told the stocks were never owned by the parties involved.

“They just wrote down numbers on paper and claimed losses,” he said. “It was just like fantasy baseball, except the taxes not paid were for real.”

Quellos, in a statement, said, “we fundamentally disagree with the report, which presents a one-sided view.” It said the transactions, which the Senate committee describes as fabrications, were real and involved “a significant possibility of economic gain and loss.”

The investigation, which took 18 months, involved 74 subpoenas, 80 interviews and the collection of more than two million documents, and yet Senator Levin said “the six cases we present are just examples, just a pinhole look.”

The 400-page report recommends eight changes, some of them aimed at going after the law and accounting firms, banks and investment advisers that the report says enable tax schemes that rely on complexity, secrecy and compartmentalizing information so that advisers can claim they had no idea that the overall transaction was a fraud.

[To read the whole article, click here.]
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