How the GOP wants to enable tax evasion for the 1% and stick you with the bill

[Legion Troll]

Yeah, we all know about Swiss banks and the Cayman Islands, and just figure that rich people have this wired and this is how it will always be. But it doesn’t have to. In fact, it has changed a little bit for the better recently. Wanna take a guess who’s been trying to do the changing, and who’s stood in the way?

First, a little background. The best estimate for the kinds of tax havens discussed in the Panama leaks is that they drain about $165 billion a year from federal revenue coffers. Gabriel Zucman, a leading expert on them, estimates that the U.S. government loses $35 billion from individual tax evaders, and $130 billion from corporate evaders.

One hundred and sixty-five billion dollars is a fair amount of money—more than you and I shelled out for any of the following categories of federal expenditure in 2015: health care and health research ($122 billion), transportation ($107 billion), education ($90 billion), or science-environment-energy ($70 billion). So we could use it.

In Europe, efforts started in the aughts to do something about this. The Bush administration wasn’t going to do much, of course. But after Barack Obama came in and the Democrats had control of both houses of Congress, Democrats—notably Michigan Sen. Carl Levin, but others too—sought to move legislation to address tax evasion.

And… they did! You probably didn’t hear about it at the time, because the effort didn’t generate nearly as many headlines as the Democratic effort to reform the financial system, address climate change, or pass a health care reform law. But note: The Democrats used their brief two-year period of total control of both the White House and Congress to address head-on about a half-dozen problems, and tax evasion was one of them.

The bill was called the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, or FATCA; how they managed not to tag that final “T” on there at the end is beyond me, someone was really asleep at the wheel.

But anyway it passed. In the Senate, it actually enjoyed a modicum of bipartisan support, as 11 GOP senators voted for it (as opposed to 28 who opposed; Democrats backed it 55-1).

But in the House, not a single Republican voted for the bill, as Nancy Pelosi let 38 nervous blue-dogs go and join all 174 Republicans.

So what did the bill do? Well, a lot of complicated things, some good, some bad, but in the main, it gave the IRS more authority to look abroad through global financial databases and figure out who might be a U.S. citizen and if so, what they might be owing Uncle Sam that they weren’t paying.

It also required foreign financial institutions to report such relevant information about U.S. citizen residents to the U.S. government.

Sounds like a pretty legit thing for the government to be doing, if you ask me.

But it involved the hated IRS, so naturally, you had all these hideous predictions from Republicans and conservatives about what FATCA was going to lead to.

It was going to make presumptive criminals out of all U.S. citizens living abroad.

It was going to compromise the privacy needs of banks.

Best of all, FATCA, once fully implemented in July 2014, was going to bring about the official demise of the U.S. dollar. Snopes.com rated that one false.

The charge is being led by just the people you’d expect.

Sen. Rand Paul introduced the bill to repeal FATCA, and sued the Treasury Department over it.

Utah Sen. Mike Lee went on a barnstorming tour of Europe to drum up momentum for a repeal (that doesn’t seem to have to worked too well—the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development issued its own tax-haven enforcement guidelines, which are for the most part tougher than FATCA’s).

But it isn’t just the von Mises gold-standard crowd that’s worked up about FATCA.

The Republican National Committee officially passed a resolution supporting its repeal.

Interestingly, in the RNC’s official resolutions from 2013-2016 inclusive, FATCA is the only piece of legislation singled out for a specific resolution of repeal. If that’s the case, FATCA must be doing something right.

FATCA and the OECD regs represent first steps in a process that’s going to take 20 or 30 years, if it succeeds even then.

Democrats, of course, aren’t perfect on this.

Hillary Clinton supported a free-trade deal with Panama, the notorious tax haven whence these leaked documents came to us.

The people on the wrong side of this one are the same people who always are, and whose dire predictions of economic catastrophe, whether about this or raising the minimum wage or anything else, almost never seem to come to pass.


Stay on topic, or this thread will be moved to the war zone, where you will find all threads that devolve to back and forth insults.


http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/04/05/republican-doom-talk-helps-enable-big-time-tax-evaders.html

 

[Legion Troll]

Oops:

The names of hundreds of Americans have surfaced in the Panama Papers, including a handful of U.S. businessmen accused or convicted by U.S. authorities for ties to financial crimes or Ponzi schemes.

The identities of the Americans emerged from the treasure trove of documents obtained by the U.S.-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and hundreds of other media organizations.

The consortium has so far identified a few Americans in the leaked files who have faced charges for serious financial crimes in the U.S.

Here are some of the Americans who have surfaced in the massive data leak, according to the media consortium.

Benjamin Wey , a Wall Street financier, was charged in September with securities fraud, wire fraud, conspiracy and money laundering for using family members to help him stealthily amass ownership of larger blocks of stock in companies through so-called “reverse merger” transactions between Chinese companies and U.S. shell companies. In the process, he reaped tens of millions of dollars of illegal profit by manipulating the companies’ stock prices, the indictment charges. Prosecutors say he was aided by his banker in Switzerland, Seref Dogan Erbek, who was also charged in the alleged scheme.

The shell companies were incorporated offshore, according to the indictment.

Wey, president of the New York Global Group, also made headlines last year when a jury awarded an $18 million verdict to a former intern who had accused Wey of sexual harassment and stalking. Wey coerced her into four sexual encounters and then fired her after finding out that she had a boyfriend.

Igor Olenicoff, the billionaire and commercial real estate mogul, was listed as a shareholder of Olen Oil Management Limited in the leaked data. He was sentenced in 2007 to two years of probation for tax evasion and forced to pay a $52 million fine for failing to declare more than $200 million stashed in offshore shell companies. Olenicoff's California-based firm owns thousands of residential and commercial properties.

Robert Miracle, of Bellevue, Wash., was sentenced in 2011 to 13 years in prison and three years of supervised release for mail fraud and tax evasion for his part in a $65 million Ponzi scheme involving an Indonesia oilfield.

John Michael “Red" Crim was convicted in Philadelphia, along with two associates, for being part of a plot in which he recruited investors to use phony trusts to cheat the IRS out of $10 million in revenue.

Crim, co-founder of the Texas-based Commonwealth Trust Company, “encouraged investors to place income and assets into trusts for the purpose of evading federal income taxes,” according the office of the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. He was sentenced to eight years in prison.

The consortium also reports Jonathan Kaplan, implicated in a bribery scheme, was among those whose names who surfaced in the papers.

Kaplan was sentenced to five years of probation for his part in accepting kickbacks from a Jordanian national. Kaplan, vice president of iBasis, a Massachusetts company that supplied prepaid calling cards to retail distributors, allegedly gave favorable pricing, credit terms and inside information to Jordanian national Fares Khraisat, the owner and operator of Zam-Zam Telecard, based in Bridgeport, Conn.




Stay on topic, or this thread will be moved to the war zone, where you will find all threads that devolve to back and forth insults.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2016/04/06/panama-papers-americans-with-past-financial-crimes/82704788/