Tax avoidance

In Vanuatu, a remote archipelago in the South Pacific, a popular tourist attraction is something called land diving. Villagers on the lush outer island of Pentecost jump headfirst from a tall wooden tower with tree vines tied to their ankles to break their fall. For the divers, the rite of passage is a plunge into the unknown—and that’s not a bad metaphor for where this secretive tax haven is headed these days.

U.S. companies that make billions of dollars from patents and other intellectual property held offshore would be eligible for a special 12.5 percent tax rate on those earnings under the Senate tax plan.

The days in paradise may be numbered for those seeking refuge from heavy tax burdens in remote islands. Finance ministers representing the world’s largest market vowed to take action following the leak of records exposing prominent members of the global business A-list.

Multinational companies including Apple Inc., Pfizer Inc. and Ford Motor Co. would face a new tax on payments they make to offshore affiliates under the House Republicans’ tax bill—a surprise provision that has stunned tax experts.

House Republicans should slow down their consideration of a tax-overhaul bill after investigative reports Sunday alleged offshore tax-avoidance by U.S. multinational companies including Apple Inc. and Nike Inc., congressional Democrats and tax-advocacy groups said.

A group of seven Senate Democrats and one independent has written a letter to the Financial Accounting Standards Board asking FASB to require multinational corporations to disclose their taxes, profits, and revenues on a country-by-country basis, echoing a recent letter from a group of House lawmakers.

The Internal Revenue Service has needed to significantly cut back a program that automatically followed up with people who failed to file a tax return, due to budget constraints, according to a new report.

Amazon.com Inc. was slapped with a European Union order to pay 250 million euros ($294 million) plus interest in back taxes to Luxembourg as the world’s biggest online retailer became the latest U.S. giant to run afoul of the bloc’s tough rules on government subsidies.

The European Commission will outline on Thursday different options for taxing digital companies as the 28-nation bloc seeks to raise money from an industry that it says provides less than it should to public coffers.

It took two days after Hurricane Irma ripped through the British Virgin Islands, damaging or destroying an estimated 70 percent of the territory’s buildings, for the Caribbean tax haven to start piecing back together its lucrative corporate-registry business.

The Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service have delayed implementation of the Obama administration’s Section 385 documentation regulations for discouraging corporate tax inversions and earnings stripping until 2019.

A former Credit Suisse Group AG banker who pleaded guilty to conspiring to help Americans hide income and assets from the Internal Revenue Service is cooperating with U.S. prosecutors in a bid for the sort of leniency her former colleagues received.

A group of 16 House Democrats has sent a letter to the Financial Accounting Standards Board asking it to require multinational companies to disclose more country-by-country reporting information in their public financial statements about where they pay taxes and book profits.

The search giant won its fight against a 1.12 billion-euro tax bill after judges rejected claims it abused loopholes to avoid paying its fair share.

The Internal Revenue Service has decided to limit its probe of Coinbase users to those who engaged in transactions of $20,000 or more, according to a court filing.

Google will find out this week if it owes 1.12 billion euros ($1.3 billion) in back taxes to France, just days after it was slapped with a record antitrust fine by the European Union.

The Internal Revenue Service has created a new section on its IRS.gov website dedicated to information on the Country-by-Country Reporting rules of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s Base Erosion and Profit Shifting project, which aims to discourage tax avoidance by multinational companies.

The Internal Revenue Service has opened a probe into the tax-exempt status of a charity funded by pharmaceutical companies, threatening a lifeline the industry uses to help patients buy expensive drugs for cancer, multiple sclerosis and other diseases.

The new hot thing in tax avoidance has a boring old name: insurance dedicated funds.

Taxpayers were required to file disclosures of so-called “micro-captive transactions” with the Internal Revenue Service by the beginning of this month, and many of them found it wasn’t so easy.