Sewers leased as tax shelters.. How Romney-esque
Makes me more interested than ever to see what shelters Romney employed.. THIS is why he's reluctant..
Enjoy this blast from the past..
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/tax/etc/synopsis.html
Introduction: Feb. 19, 2003
It was one of corporate America's biggest hidden profit centers in the past decade -- the tax shelter -- and it became so lucrative that last year it helped major U.S. companies cut their tax rate to just half of what they had historically paid, leaving individual taxpayers to make up the difference.
The General Accounting Office estimates that illegitimate tax shelters cost the government more than $85 billion in recent years. "Anything that's not being paid that should be paid, that's basically what the honest taxpayer is making up," asserts Charles Rossotti, a Republican businessman who became commissioner of Internal Revenue in 1997 and spent five years battling bogus shelters. Rossotti estimates that because the government is not collecting all that is owed -- the biggest piece of which is illegitimate tax shelters -- everyone else is paying 15 percent more than they should.
How investigating "Tax Me If You Can" led producer Rick Young into the sewers of Bochum, Germany. In "Tax Me If You Can," FRONTLINE correspondent Hedrick Smith investigates the rampant abuse of tax shelters since the late 1990s. Through interviews with government officials, tax experts, and industry insiders, Smith uncovers an avalanche of bogus transactions -- created by some of America's biggest and most-respected accounting firms, law firms, and investment banks -- that were then aggressively marketed to big corporations and wealthy individuals.
"These were close to sham transactions -- some were clearly sham transactions, [that] had nothing to do with investment," says John "Buck" Chapoton, former treasury department policymaker in the Reagan administration. "They simply were financial mechanisms for creating losses -- tax losses, not economic losses."
FRONTLINE's Smith notes, "Chasing bogus tax shelters for the IRS was like a game of cat and mouse. The IRS had a terrible time finding them because they were hidden deep in tax returns. Once the IRS spotted one type of shelter and issued a regulation to block it, the shelter promoters had designed a new one. The IRS was forever playing catch-up."
snip for more deliciousness
