A recent study by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy details how Fortune 500 Companies are holding a record $2.6 trillion offshore, thereby avoiding $767 billion in U.S. taxes. While we believe much of this amount is the result of lawful tax planning on the companies’ international operations and the use of tax haven entities, there remains a significant amount of aggressive tax planning here which is ripe for potential IRS whistleblower cases. For example, a byproduct of holding trillions of dollars offshore is that it is difficult to bring the money back to the U.S. to use it without paying taxes on those deferred profits. Therefore, many taxpayers have entered into abusive repatriation transactions to bring the cash back. Or taxpayers have used hyper aggressive tax planning strategies involving financing structures or transfer pricing to get the profits in the tax haven jurisdiction in the first place. While Congress may eliminate deferral or make other drastic changes to the Internal Revenue Code in the coming year, the fact remains that these tax underpayments already exist and thus are subject to IRS whistleblower claims. We suspect the transition rules to whatever new international tax regime Congress comes up with will be similarly and abusively gamed by these companies to wring out the last drop of tax savings.
While many of the Fortune 500 companies have set aside reserves for uncertain tax positions that would cover some of this tax avoidance, many other taxpayers have not reserved at all for these positions by convincing their financial auditors that the risk is minimal or by hiding the risk from them altogether. We’ve been carefully tracking these reserves since 2010 and have concluded that the answer is usually a little bit of both. Either way, whistleblowers with access to tax accrual workpapers would be able to see what those reserved weaknesses are, and whistleblowers who have unique insight to the unreserved positions have valuable information as well about what those skeletons in the closet are. We’ve had great success reporting both to the IRS under their tax whistleblower program, so if you know of either type of issue you should give us a call to discuss what your opportunities and rights are.
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