Companies find other ways to move offshore and avoid U.S. taxes
AUGUST 31, 2014 LAST UPDATED: SUNDAY, AUGUST 31, 2014, 1:21 AM
BY ZACHARY R. MIDER
BLOOMBERG NEWS
THE RECORD
* Some firms have left the U.S. system not through inversions but through buyouts by investment funds
NEW YORK — There’s more than one way for a U.S. company to avoid taxes by claiming a foreign address.
Consider the business founded in 1916 as General Plate Co., a maker of sensors and controls for everything from Fords and Frigidaires to the spaceship that first carried Americans to the moon. While its top executives are still based in Attleboro, Mass., it’s now known as Sensata Technologies Holding NV of the Netherlands.
Sensata didn’t become Dutch by using the strategy known as “inversion” that has alarmed President Obama and that the U.S. Treasury Department and some Democrats in Congress are trying to curb. That technique, which involves reincorporating overseas without a change in majority ownership, has helped more than 40 U.S. companies lower their tax bills.
Instead, Sensata is one of at least 13 firms that have left the U.S. tax system through a sale to an investment fund, according to a tally by Bloomberg News. Although these companies have a combined market value of about $75 billion, this tax-avoidance strategy has gotten less attention in Washington than inversions and may be harder to discourage.
These buyouts mean profits for the U.S. private equity firms like Boston-based Bain Capital that orchestrated them. Bain earned more than $3 billion after it took Sensata public as a Dutch company in 2010, with an effective tax rate about one-tenth of some competing manufacturers.
Shifting to a foreign tax domicile “is looked at hard in every private equity deal,” said Joan Arnold, a tax partner at Pepper Hamilton in Philadelphia. “They will be interested in what they can do to minimize taxes and maximize sale price.”
– See more at: https://www.northjersey.com/news/business/tax-avoiders-get-creative-1.1078561#sthash.j4QYTjZn.dpuf
