Excerpt
Excerpt
Treasury's Unfinished Work on Corporate Expatriations. Stephen Shay, February 22, 2016, Paper. "Continued tax-motivated inversions of U.S. corporations into foreign corporations highlight the systemic tax advantages that a foreign-owned U.S. corporation has over a U.S.-owned corporation in avoiding U.S. corporate tax on U.S. business income. In the absence of congressional action, this article emphasizes the need for the Treasury to further reduce U.S. tax incentives for inversions and other foreign acquisitions of U.S. corporations. The two most important of the tax incentives are earnings stripping and the ability to use, directly or indirectly, a U.S. group’s unrepatriated foreign earnings for the benefit of shareholders of the foreign parent corporation without incurring current U.S. income tax. These tax advantages will not be meaningfully reduced by any plausible lowering of the top U.S. corporate tax rate. Moreover, earnings stripping would be exacerbated by adoption of a territorial system."