Tyler Hurst swiped his debit card at a Walgreens pharmacy in central Phoenix and kicked off an international odyssey of corporate tax avoidance.
Hurst went home with an amber bottle of Lexapro, the world’s third-best selling antidepressant. The profits from his $99 purchase began a 9,400-mile journey that would lead across the Atlantic Ocean and more than halfway back again, to a grassy industrial park in Dublin, a glass skyscraper in Amsterdam and a law office in Bermuda surrounded by palm trees.
While Forest Laboratories Inc, the medicine’s maker, sells Lexapro only in the US, the voyage ensures most of its profits aren’t taxed there — and they face little tax anywhere else. Forest cut its US tax bill by more than a third last year with a technique known as transfer pricing, a method that carves an estimated $60 billion a year from the US Treasury as it combines tax planning and alchemy.
Transfer pricing lets companies such as Forest, Oracle Corp, Eli Lilly & Co and Pfizer Inc, legally avoid some income taxes by converting sales in one country to profits in another — on paper only, and often in places where they have few employees or actual sales.
After an economic bailout in which the US government lent, spent or guaranteed as much as $12.8 trillion, the Obama administration faces a projected budget deficit of $1.5 trillion this year. In February, the administration said it would target some of the techniques companies use to shift profits offshore — part of a package intended to raise $12 billion a year over the coming decade.
Losing $60 billion
That’s only about a fifth of the $60 billion in annual US tax revenue lost to thousands of companies’ income shifting, according to a study published in December in the National Tax Journal by Kimberly A Clausing, an economics professor at Reed College in Portland, Oregon.
The lost revenue could pay the federal government’s share of health coverage for more than 10 million uninsured Americans, such as Hurst — more than a third of the people who will gain insurance under the health-care overhaul passed in March. The administration’s proposed tax on certain financial institutions would take almost seven years to generate $60 billion.
“Transfer pricing is the corporate equivalent of the secret offshore accounts of individual tax dodgers,” said Sen. Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat and chairman of the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, in a statement to Bloomberg News. Levin has overseen hearings on tax shelters including those sold to wealthy people by KPMG LLP. “Now that progress has been made in addressing offshore tax abuse by individuals, transfer pricing is an issue that deserves scrutiny.”
